Subtle One-Act Play Tackles Love, Hate and Race South Africa

Athol Fugard's play Master Harold...and the Boys, winner of numerous Best Play Awards, moves its audience emotionally and intellectually.

The play, a one-act piece about the infection of racism into the relationship between two Black men and a white boy, finds its power not in its depiction of hate fostered by bigotry, but in its illustration of love and respect tainted and twisted by racism.

Fugard sets his story of a white schoolboy and the two Black men who have befriended him (while working for his parents) in his native South Africa. Master Harold, called "Hally" (Brian Kleppe), wears a tie and blazer to school and comes home to the cramped St. George's Park Tea Room, where the entire one act play takes place. Sam (Jomo I. L. Ray) and Willie (E. William McGlaston), wiping the counter and scrubbing the floor, await him there.

Hally's parents, whom we never meet, own the tea room. His mother calls Hally from the hospital, where she visits his invalid, alcoholic, racist father.

As Hally tries to do his homework and Willie practices his steps for the upcoming ballroom dancing competition, the bulk of the dialogue takes the form of Sam and Hally's reminiscences.

Sam has become Hally's substitute father over the years, and their recollections are beautiful and moving. Fugard's language is at its best here. Sam and Hally talk about the map of South Africa Hally had to make for school--Sam remembers all the cities; they remember Sam and Willie's old bedroom and they laugh about the kite Sam made for Hally.

But when Hally learns his father will be leaving the hospital and coming home, he flies into a rage, ostensibly because he will have to "rub his gammy leg and empty his pisspots" again. But his real anger stems from blaming his father for being ill, an alcoholic and a racist.

Brian Kleppe's performance as Hally is affecting, but his alienating character prevents the audience from liking him. Thus the climatic scene, in which his love for Sam and shame for his father are twisted around by conflicting social cues about Black and white skins, is less effective.

Master Harold... and the Boys

directed by Mort Kaplan

at the Lyric Stage

Through April 19

In other productions, Hally has been cast as a more attractive character at the beginning of the play, and his love for Sam has been more prominent--which makes his hateful treatment of Sam toward the end of the play even more poignant. While it is painful to watch what he does to Sam, Kleppe never shows the contrast between the love which yields to hate and shame.

E. Phillip McGlaston, on the other hand, creates a wonderful Willie. McGlaston doesn't play up Willie's simplicity, but rather comes off as tragically sweet and natural.

He harbors no anger for most of the play, except for the instance when Hally spits in Sam's face. "I want to hurt him," moans Sam. When Willie tries to calm him, Sam asks him: "What if it were you?" Willie responds, "If he had spit on me like I was a dog?", seemingly considering this prospect for the first time. "I would like to hit him. I would like to hit him hard."

The absence of Willie's gentleness, which McGlaston has portrayed so well, is frightening. But after a tense moment, he merely says: "But maybe I just go out back and cry."

Jomo I. L. Ray gives a magnificent performance as Sam. At first his perpetual smile seems almost painted, but as the play progresses the smile becomes loving and fatherly. When Hally's hidden racism surfaces, the change in Ray's expression is terrifying. His anger and sorrow are heartbreaking, making us wish desperately to have the smile back.

Ray's performance is at once unassuming and good-natured, strong and endearing, painful and tragic. Sam must communicate to the audience the pain of the play--that although in ballroom dancing "accidents don't happen," in the world "we are all bumping into each other. No one knows the steps and there is no music playing."

Ray's stricken, dignified posture at the end of Master Harold is subtle and powerful acting, and his performance throughout the play lifts the Lyric Stage's production to an interpretation of Fugard's terrible, wonderful play that does it justice.