COMING HOME at the Fountain.

I think the first play I saw by Athol Fugard, the South African senior dean of playwriting, was “The Road to Mecca,” which I attended in a famous production, starring the playwright, at the Lyttleton when I was sixteen or something like that. At the time, the show’s philosophical and political elements were wasted on a bratty wretch such as myself. To a sixteen year old brat obsessed with Tom Baker-era Doctor Who and Star Trek, there was nothing less compelling than a stage filled with a dreary folks yakking it up bout the atrocities of Apartheid. I remember thinking, “Boy is this play BORING!” In fact, I believe that I thought the play was so boring, I stayed away from any Athol Fugard play for long after Apartheid fell in South Africa.
It is quite possible that, at 45, I am finally now old enough to appreciate Fugard, as this weekend, I found the Fountain Theater’s production of “Coming Home” to be an extraordinary moving work. The fall of Apartheid did for Fugard what the fall of the Soviet Communism did for John Le Carre: It essentially undercut much of what motivated the writers’ work. However, unlike Le Carre, Fugard has continued to write effectively about the cultural evolution of his home land. While the piece misses the anti-Apartheid furor of his earlier works, this play is a powerful meditation on mid-life disappointment, and on the notion that sometimes things don’t get better in the world: Sometimes things get worse.
Veronica (Deidre Henry) has returned to the small town shanty in which she was brought up by her loving grandfather Oupa (Adolphus Ward). As a girl, Veronica found her home incredibly stifling, and her dreams of becoming a chanteuse drove her to leave home for Johannesberg. However, like so many young girls adrift in the Big City, Veronica soon found herself pregnant and jobless, and was forced to turn to a life of prostitution to make ends meet. Penniless and hopeless, she contracted AIDS and returned, with her tail between her legs, to the shanty she swore she would never see again. She finds that her beloved grandfather has died – and that her only friend is slow witted childhood playmate Witboi (Thomas Silcott, entirely endearing), who has been taking care of the farm land and house in her grandfather’s name. Veronica’s young son (Timothy Taylor) is disgusted by the squalid home – and takes an immediate dislike to Witboi, whom he thinks is stupid. But Veronica has great incentive to make things work: She’s too poor to be allowed to receive any of the medications that could save her life and will die soon. Act Two takes place several years later, as the son, now 10, has been forced to grow up in a hurry as his mother’s health declines.
Director Stephen Sach helms a particularly powerful character-driven production whose intimacy is frequently incredibly haunting. Over the course of the story, we start to feel as though we are invested in these characters’ lives. And, when we see Henry’s Veronica in the first part of Act Two, bitter and resigned, and ferocious with a desperation to ensure the safety of her child after she’s gone, there’s something terrifically sad about the transition. Fugard utilizes visions and flashbacks to craft a haunting mood. A scene in which Henry launches into a rock song in which she appears to be the star she dreams of being is lit with glittering disco lights, which vanishes, along with her grandfather’s ghost, to show the grim world she actually lives in. And the final coda, which shows the woman dying while her writer son mystically bonds with his long dead grandfather, is beautifully executed, albeit hard to justify logically speaking. Moody, beautiful, and strangely despairing, the play’s clearly a text that could only be written by a mature writer who understands disappointment and loss: It’s the perfect antidote to LEGALLY BLONDE: THE MUSICAL, which, I have to tell you, I wouldn’t see with your eyes.