Master Harold...and the Boys may not be the best of the many plays that South African playwright Athol Fugard has written over the past fifty years, but it is the first one that I saw when it opened on Broadway in 1982. Since then I can rate such gems as A Lesson From Aloes, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and The Road to Mecca more highly in his canon. But that doesn’t make Master Harold any less a memorable play worthy of revival. And this one at the Signature Theater stands high with a fine cast and under the knowing direction of the playwright (who also directed the original production).
The tragedy of South Africa’s embrace of apartheid and its effect on a people who needed a good deal of consciousness raising and love to bridge those ridiculous man-made boundaries is the theme but not the story of this impassioned play. As are many of Fugard’s works, this one is a particularly courageous attempt to expose the root cause of hate among men ten years before a new government would officially end apartheid.
The play’s setting is South Africa in 1950, and it brings together universal truths through the interaction of three characters who discover painfully and irrevocably how seeds planted in childhood bear fruit in maturity. The loves and emotions of these three sensitive human beings are entwined in a relationship destined to become a stage on which are exposed the weeds of bigotry. But it is a place in which we also see a blossoming of understanding and tolerance.
Mostly free of pompous platitudes but rich with metaphor, Master Harold...and the Boys is a powerful and compassionate story of Hally (Noah Robbins) a seventeen-year-old Afrikaner who finds himself at the crossroads of childhood and manhood unable to make a comfortable adjustment in his relationship with two black middle-aged waiters he has grown up with in his parents’ tea room in Port Elizabeth and for which set designer Christopher H. Barreca has created the realistic ambiance.
Sam (Leon Addison Brown) and Willie (Sahr Ngaujah) have been Hally’s second family since he was an infant. The delicately balanced relationship between them has been kept more or less subliminal until a crises occurs that detail the crumbling of Hally’s character. Unable to cope with the knowledge that the Boys have mentored him through the years and nurtured a kinship that their society is not able to tolerate, Hally stupidly and irrationally regresses to a state of despair and, more regrettably ignorance, when he is forced to deal with the unexpected return from the hospital of his disabled and alcoholic father (unseen).
As the story’s provocateur, Hally is a complex mixture of immaturity and intelligence. Noah Robbins’s stature is on the small side, but it works as an intriguing center of politicized and social power particularly in contrast to the hefty bodies and subservient positions of his co-stars. Robbins, who made a terrific impression in the excellent but short-lived Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, is perfect as the conflicted Hally. His emotional outbursts and humiliating attack on Sam are painful and as stunning to see, as was hearing the audible gasps of the audience at the performance I saw.
Brown, a fine actor whose performances were notable in two other Fugard plays previously presented at the Signature - The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek and The Train Driver — brings a restrained sense of dignity to his role as he recoils from Hally’s taunts. At first devastated, then, as if strengthened by some inner self awareness, he rallies and becomes a man in possession of his soul.
Ngaujah, who wowed audiences with his performance in the title role of Fela!, is especially interesting to watch as Willie, a man whose tempered vulnerability becomes painful to witness as he sees the ones he loves the most sever the ties that have bound them.
I may have quibbles about the amount of expositional information Fugard offers to set the stage for the explosive denouement in his ninety-minute play, but overall this is a play of hope written with extraordinary power and insight by a playwright who has brought true distinction to the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage for over fifty years.
