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By Clifford A. Ridley
INQUIRER THEATER CRITIC
PRINCETON - The South African living room onstage at the McCarter Theatre is described in the program as comfortable, but it scarcely looks that way: Its furnishings consist entirely of a long table, some accompanying wooden chairs, and a single small armchair with a side table and lamp. Comfortable is a relative term, to be sure, but the only people likely to apply it to this abode would be monks.
Yet if Susan Hilferty's ascetic set is something of a misrepresentation, so is the enterprise it serves. Athol Fugard's Sorrows and Rejoicings, having its world premiere under the author's direction, is said to be a play, but in fact it is nearly two hours of vamping in search of a play that never arrives.
The time is the present; the onstage dwelling is the home of Dawid, an Afrikaner poet who has just died. (The w in Dawid's name is pronounced like a v; the a is long or short depending on whether the speaker's dialect is Afrikaans or English.) A political activist during the apartheid era, Dawid spent 17 years in exile in England, returning to his home in the dusty Karoo region only in his last days of life. Now his adoring black servant, Marta, and his English wife, Allison, have come back from his funeral with Rebecca, the 18-year-old daughter he fathered with Marta before he married.
Marta, the Karoo native, and Allison, the outsider, have long had an uneasy, suspicious relationship whose resentments are grounded not in race but in ownership. Who loved the man more? Who was most protective of his talent? Did Allison encourage him to leave, thereby provoking his alcoholic decline? Such matters, along with endless discussion of what happened when, are aired in soporific dialogue while Rebecca stands mute outside an upstage door.
Now and then, the poet himself makes flashback appearances at different ages. Bizarrely overacted by John Glover, he is a self-dramatizing windbag, not at all the paragon of either the women's recollections or the playwright's intent. Rather than clarifying the play, he muddies it.
Finally, Rebecca speaks. She has long hated her father, whom she believes responsible for Marta's remaining a "stinkwood servant," so-called for her ritual polishing of the center-stage table. And so, for an instant, you believe something is actually going to happen, some honest-to-God conflict is about to occur. But Rebecca lets you down; she, too, merely relates something that happened in the past.
As the similarity of the men's names suggests, Fugard likens Dawid to the Roman poet Ovid, exiled by Emperor Augustus to a Black Sea fishing village. Perhaps, if Dawid were endowed with a real life and a real personality, the parallel might resonate. And perhaps, if the three women were allowed to act out their relationships rather than simply talk about them, Sorrows and Rejoicings might have something to say about the care and feeding of the artistic soul.
But none of this occurs, and the play remains static and unfulfilling. Its languors are exacerbated by Fugard's poky staging, with the unfortunate result that Blair Brown (as Allison), L. Scott Caldwell (Marta) and Marcy Harriell (Rebecca) have the paradoxical task of acting in a play virtually without action.
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