Lantern's 'Master Harold...'

Volcano in a tearoom

DAN ROTTENBERG

The test of a great work is: Does it transcend its immediate subject? The Roman Empire may be long dead, but Julius Caesar remains relevant for anyone living in a world of would-be latter-day empire builders, of whom I could name a few. Tsarist Russia is gone, but Fiddler On the Roof continues to speak to the universal tensions between parents and children. Conversely, an entertaining wartime movie like Casablanca comforted and emboldened a world threatened by Nazis but has little to teach us today and so survives primarily as a nostalgic period piece.

But as Lantern Theater Company’s current production demonstrates, Athold Fugard’s "Master Harold"…and the Boys amply passes this test. When it was first produced in 1982, Master Harold was praised as a searing indictment of apartheid, the South African system of racial separation that debased both its intended black targets and the whites it was designed to protect. Today, thanks in part to courageous voices like Fugard’s, apartheid is dead, but the power of Master Harold remains, in its portrayal of the way psychological tribal barriers— say, between Christians and Muslims, or between Israelis and Palestinians, or between gays and straights— tragically destroy potentially uplifting individual relationships.

Doomed to perpetual childhood

Fugard’s one-act play takes place in 1950 in a tea shop in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where the white proprietors’ adolescent son Harold (Ahren Potratz), loosely modeled after Fugard himself, seeks after-school refuge with his family’s black retainers, the oafish Willie (James Christopher Tolbert) and the more worldly Sam (Frank X). Willie and Sam are old enough to be Harold’s father, and indeed took much of the responsibility for rearing him from childhood. But where Harold is growing painfully to eventual manhood, Willie and Sam are trapped by their skin color in perpetual boyhood. Their grandest dream is a ballroom dance competition, “A world in which accidents don’t happen,” where “We can be champions, instead of always being beginners.”

Harold talks airily of changing the social system and of educating Willie and Sam the way Tolstoy educated his peasants. But deep down he’s ashamed of himself, his parents and, implicitly, by the special privileges he enjoys by virtue of his skin color— and Willie and Sam, because they’re convenient and vulnerable, inevitably become the outlets for his self-loathing. “You’re only a servant in here, and don’t forget it,” he lashes out when Sam grows too familiar. In spite of himself, Harold has instinctively inherited the mindset of his parents and their social class. The question Fugard implicitly raises is: Can such a mindset be changed? And if so, how?

A few holes in Fugard’s script

The Lantern’s production offers a marvelous vehicle for examining these questions. The intimacy of the small St. Stephen’s Theater provides the sense that we’re right in that little tearoom with the three characters, feeling the tension among them bubble beneath the surface until it finally explodes an hour and 45 minutes later. In this small space, like the characters themselves, there’s no escaping the psychological hell in which they’re trapped. All three performers are excellent, yet even in this company the magnetic Frank X stands out; you can feel his imposing presence even when he’s sitting silently at a table, listening to Harold on the phone with his mother or watching Willie practice his dance steps. Rarely has anyone so masterfully captured the hidden substance within an invisible man.

To be sure, this close encounter with Fugard’s play reveals some holes in his script. Sam’s character is a shade too noble to be believed; Willie is a tad too dense; Harold is a bit too naïve. But perhaps that’s the point: The three of them, each in his own way, is a bubble boy— isolated, by artificial constructs, from the natural world as well as from his real potential. What’s more striking about this production is how well Master Harold… holds up now that apartheid is no longer a political issue, and in many respects how prescient Master Harold was about apartheid’s demise. “All you’ve got to do is stand up and walk away from it,” Sam tells Harold— which is, of course, precisely how South Africans ultimately solved apartheid, just as Eastern Europeans solved Communism and Filipinos solved the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Not a bad deal for a powerful evening of theater.


To read another review of this production by Robert Zaller, click here.