STAGE REVIEW : A ‘Playland’ That Sputters From Fugard

SAN DIEGO — Blame. Anger. Guilt. How do you deal with them? In Athol Fugard’s case, you write another play.

As a white South African who has challenged the poisons of apartheid in everything he’s written, Fugard apparently was compelled to take on the effects of its demise.

The result is “Playland,” which was given its U.S. premiere Sunday at the Lyceum Stage as a co-production of the La Jolla Playhouse and the Alliance Theatre Company of Atlanta (where it will open in October). As in real life, it would seem that it’s harder to tackle apartheid’s aftermath than it was to combat its injustice.

This two-actor drama brings together a white veteran of South Africa’s Border War with what is now Namibia, and the black watchman for a traveling amusement park pitched on the outskirts of a small town in the Karoo. The time is New Year’s Eve, 1989.

Gideon Le Roux, the white carnival-goer, is in a mood. The memory of 27 men he killed during that war has him paralyzed in his tracks. He wants deliverance.

Martinus Zoeloe, the black man, spent 15 years in jail for killing just one man, which he’s done, as he puts it, “too many times.” He’s not sorry about it, just angry. But he’s finished with trouble. And Gideon and his demons spell trouble. “You and me,” threatens the white man, “that’s what it’s all about. Things to settle. Right here, right now.”

The set-up is classic--and classically obvious. It is a battle of frontal anguish against a background of cheap thrills: calliope music, roller-coaster tracks and a spinning Ferris wheel. (The fine, suggestive set is by associate director Susan Hilferty, with flashing lights from Dennis Parichy.)

One man pushes, the other pulls back. Gideon spills out his guts, taunting Martinus to kill or forgive him. But Martinus has had it with “number six” (the Sixth Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”). He’s content as a day and night watchman (“I watch everything . . . I don’t sleep”). He cooks his suppers on a trash-can fire and nurses his anger.

This organized conflict goes through predictable clashes and tortured confessionals to emerge in the rosy dawn of a new day in a new year with a promise of hope. It’s an ending more cathartic for the author than the audience.

This wanness has nothing to do with the acting, which is splendid on both counts. Ben Halley Jr. plays the loner Martinus as a barking giant, a force of nature emotionally insulated inside a body like the trunk of a sturdy tree.

Larry Golden’s Gideon is the reverse: slippery, fidgety, peripatetic, endlessly reaching for the whiskey in his pocket, he is decadence personified and the more dramatically developed of the two--a crumbling man demanding to be rescued or shot.

Fugard has acknowledged that “Playland” was “the most emotionally exhausting” enterprise in his 50 years of writing, but the charity he’s built into its resolution is ultimately limp.

The men, balanced at opposing ends of the same rotten system, are equally victimized by it. Despite the eloquence of the exchanges between them, their conversation goes on too long. In the end, it is Fugard’s own hope for national atonement that is projected onto characters endemically not ready to forgive. Especially not Martinus.

It is not a matter of looking at the ongoing strife in South Africa and wishing Fugard, who also directs, had written a tougher play. It is actual difficulty in tracking the connection between what we see of and hear from these characters and what they finally do.

*

Martinus isn’t kidding when he tells Gideon, “I am just a night watchman. Go ask your god for forgiveness.” And one wishes he’d followed his own advice when he states, “We’ve done what we’ve done; we go to hell and that’s the end of it.”

Fugard won’t let it be “the end of it.” For all of the grandeur in his verbal sparring, it is talk that eventually undermines itself. The contrast between the men is too carefully ordered, too much of a calculated mirror image.

Unlike the febrile sense of impulse in his “My Children, My Africa” or the bleakness of his “A Lesson From Aloes” (two plays seen earlier at La Jolla), Fugard’s “Playland” is as planned as a gated community. And its ending, for all its decorative banter, remains just as stubbornly counterfeit.

“Playland,” La Jolla Playhouse at the Lyceum Theatre, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 2. $23.75-$29.75; (619) 534-3960 and (619) 235-8025. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Ben Halley Jr.: Martinus Zoeloe

Larry Golden: Gideon Le Roux

Bill Flynn: The voice of “Barking Barney” Barkhuizen

American premiere of a co-production of the La Jolla Playhouse and the Alliance Theatre Company of Atlanta. Playwright and director Athol Fugard. Associate director Susan Hilferty. Set and costumes Susan Hilferty. Lights Dennis Parichy. Sound David Budries. Vocal coach Susan Leigh. Stage manager Sandra Lea Williams. Assistant stage manager Debbie Falb.