'What I Did Last Summer' and 'The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek'

But at the heart, each of these two wonderful productions offers a deeply moving story about the coming of age of a boy and his country.

“This is a play about me,” declares Charlie, at the top of What I Did Last Summer, and the 14-year-old is stirring up a storm on the shores of Lake Erie. His father is on a boat in the Pacific, fighting in World War II, and his mother, Grace, is trying to keep the family together at their summer cottage. Charlie is in high rebellion, fighting with his older sister, Elsie, refusing to do household chores, lazing, cursing, and driving everyone to distraction.

Then Charlie finally gets a job (at 25 cents an hour) with the local outcast, and his world changes. Anna Trumbull, a.k.a. “the Pig Woman” — a mysterious recluse of Indian descent — takes him on as a project and tries to help him “realize his potential.” As played by Kristine Nielsen, she’s a flamboyant, formidable eccentric and one of the most delightful creations in Gurney’s rich oeuvre. She casts a spell over the rambunctious Charlie, played with equal panache by the talented Noah Galvin, and their scenes together as mentor and disciple are hilarious and heartwarming as she gives him art lessons to help him find his talent and his identity.

Style illuminates content

Jim Simpson directs this touching tale in a unique, metatheatrical style. As Noah narrates, the pages of the script appear on the upstage wall of Michael Yeargen’s ingenious set, and a musician sitting to the side punctuates the action on a variety of percussive instruments. Style illuminates content, and as the story unfolds, you realize that playwright Gurney is writing his own personal, poignant narrative.

Ultimately, Charlie’s rebellion climaxes with a crash (literally), the summer is over, and so is the war. As in Chekhov, Gurney’s play is deceptive in its simplicity. It’s about more than Noah coming of age (the program notes explain that the word “teen-ager” was first introduced into our cultural lexicon in 1945): It’s about America’s own growing pains, passing from adolescence into maturity.

Outsider perspective

Playing in another theater just across the lobby, Fugard’s powerful Painted Rocks tells another affecting coming-of-age story. This one is suggested by the life of outsider artist Nukain Mabusa, fictionalized by Fugard to express his own vision of his beloved homeland.

Set in 1981 on a remote farm in apartheid South Africa, Nukain (Leon Addison Brown) is a poor black servant who finds expression as an artist. Every Sunday, while his employers are at church, he paints flowers on rocks in their garden, assisted by his ten-year-old grandson Bokkie (Caleb McLaughlin). On this particular Sunday, however, Nukain (now at the end of his life) says he has no flowers left inside him to paint. Instead, he tackles the Big One, a huge rock in the center of the garden. With the aid of Bokkie, he confronts his final challenge and paints a self-portrait on the face of the rock, with huge eyes, bold black and white stripes to signify his journey, and a brilliant headdress to represent a rainbow. “It’s my life story,” he tells his grandson. And more — it’s his identity.

But Mrs. Elmarie (Bianca Amato), his white, Afrikaner employer, demands that Nukain wash the painting away. She wants pretty flowers in her garden, not self-portraits of anonymous black servants. When Bokkie protests, Mrs. Elmarie commands Nukain to whip his grandson with his belt. “It doesn’t matter,” Nukain consoles Bokkie. Speaking of the huge eyes painted on the rock, he says: “Maybe one day they’ll open their eyes; then they will see us,” speaking metaphorically of his white masters and their blindness toward the oppressed black population.

Returning for a legacy

Act II takes place in 2003, decades after Nukain’s death. Apartheid is over, and now gangs of enraged blacks are terrorizing the farmlands, robbing and killing Afrikaners. Bokkie — now called Jonathan (Kevin Mambo), a liberated, educated citizen in the new South Africa — has returned to the farm to finish his grandfather’s work. A terrified Mrs. Elmarie greets him with a loaded pistol, and a heated confrontation ensues. A scene that borders on violence evolves into an urgent dialogue between the two new faces of South Africa: the liberated blacks who are still struggling for identity and enfranchisement, and the traumatized old-guard Afrikaners who feel they’ve lost a country that is rightfully theirs.
“May I have your permission to restore Nukain Mabusa’s last painting?” It’s a question that Bokkie puts to Mrs. Elmarie in that final scene, and the solution they find together signifies Fugard’s vision for South Africa’s future.

“I’m an Outsider Artist, too,” Fugard (now 82) says in the program, comparing himself to his protagonist. He also implies that this play may very well be his last one. Fugard’s legacy to the world is a significant dramatic oeuvre, majestic in its simplicity, dignity, and power, dedicated to the coming of age of his beloved country and the hope that it will one day find a true brotherhood between the races.

Above right: Leon Addison Brown in The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. (Photo by Joan Marcus)