Shades of Black and White

As three women gather on a stark set at the funereal opening of Athol Fugard’s new play “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” having its West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, it quickly becomes apparent that the main character in the story, a man, is already dead. The women--his wife, his mistress and his illegitimate only child--will bring him back to life through memory and argument as they recount his sins and virtues, and the man himself, an exiled South African poet, will reappear before their eyes and ours and ask to be forgiven his trespasses.

Such is the dreamlike scenario for this, another of Fugard’s elegant meditations on the personal cost of apartheid that offer enduring images of a beautiful, cruel land even as they fail to gather much steam as drama.

The engine of the play runs in reverse, piecing together in flashback and reverie the biography of an embattled white writer who opposed the racism of his government and suffered the punishment of expatriation. While it is not Fugard’s biography exactly, when John Glover, as the writer Dawid Olivier, makes his first appearance onstage to spew a hallucinatory monologue fueled by the emotions of returning home after 16 years in England, he uncannily calls up the image of a disheveled Fugard himself, albeit with longer hair and better teeth.

Dawid, we come to understand, was a victim of his times. A man of conscience whose writings were banned, he was forced to leave home with his English-speaking, academic wife, Allison (Judith Light), only to become a pathetic pub-crawling expatriate in damp and dreary London, dreaming of the hard blue sky and relentless sun of his native veldt. He never forgot South Africa and never forgot Marta (Cynthia Martells), the black housekeeper and mistress he left behind along with their unacknowledged daughter, Rebecca ( Brienin Nequa Bryant). Unable to have more children with Allison, in London he appears to have lost both his manhood and his reason for being.

His relationships with Marta and Rebecca remained secret for reasons as plain as the harsh reality of apartheid. But 16 years later, on the day Dawid is buried back home in the new South Africa of President Nelson Mandela, the consequences of his illicit affair are suddenly laid bare in an unforgiving scrutiny.

Was he a victimizer after all, as well as a victim? Or was everyone under the merciless desert sun merely burned by fate?

In plays such as “The Blood Knot,” “Master Harold ... and the Boys” and “A Lesson From Aloes,” Fugard dramatized the inhumanity of the old order in South Africa, and in the more recent “Valley Song,” staged at the Taper in 1997, fashioned a parable of the painful transition to the freedom and liberation that finally came. In “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” he has taken yet another angle, looking back as if to remind us how the shapes of certain lives, both white and black, remain altered by the former racial divide.

Directed by the author, the story of this latest play unfolds on an abstract set of broad panels full of tan swirls (designed by Susan Hilferty) suggesting a sprawling desert backdrop. The action takes shape as something of a seance, with Allison and Marta calling up scenes of Dawid from the past, while tensely searching for a mutual acceptance between two women in mourning who loved the same man. Their differences are profound and succinctly defined when Allison pronounces her husband’s name “DA-vid,” while Marta says “Dawid,” in the local dialect of Afrikaans.

Light neatly conveys both the force and foreignness of the English language and culture transplanted to the African outback, while Martells is equally adept at convincing us of how much this place belongs to her. She glides slowly but effortlessly around the bare room, with every movement seeming to challenge Light’s presumption to occupy the same space. It’s an admirable collaboration of opposites in what are the play’s most effective characterizations.

As Rebecca, Bryant spends the first half of the play’s uninterrupted 100 minutes standing mute in an upstage doorway, refusing to enter the room her mother has cleaned all her life and where, in fact, Rebecca, was conceived. She watches ruefully as her mother lovingly polishes a massive stinkwood table, an emblem of the nation she has rubbed smooth “with her tears.” When at last Rebecca does speak, it is to loose a scene-stealing torrent of bile and outrage at how Dawid has treated her mother, abandoning the both of them for years before returning hastily to die on his native soil.

Bryant’s chair-tossing soliloquy lights a spark under a play that has passed to this point as a series of painterly recollections and ruminations on the life of a dead poet in a tragic country where, it is pointed out, poetry and politics cannot be separated. But her righteous anger stands apart from what seems the play’s main conflict, the internal dilemma of the expatriate irreconcilably homesick for a place he cannot go back to for the reasons that he left in the first place.

The dilemma itself is muted because it is internal, and because it’s being told as something that happened years ago. Glover’s sinewy poses and febrile recitations lend an undeniable momentum to the apparition of Dawid, but he can only do so much to propel a story forward that is going backward from the beginning. Always an interesting actor to watch, Glover strives here to lay bare the soul of a good man turned wretch now asking for redemption from the grave. It is a multicolored performance of furious business and impish asides, but I’m not sure it ever reaches the realm of tragedy staked out by the playwright.

There are all kinds of theater, and Fugard’s sparsely populated and sparely plotted tone poems are an advanced model of the most literary kind. They play out like spells, hovering in the landscape of dust and dry plain evoked through his talent for natural imagery as conveyed by dialogue. We are always glad to see them but leave the theater wondering if it is the landscape itself that is his main subject or the parched lives of his fellow South Africans whose stories seem to melt there.

“Sorrows and Rejoicings,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A., Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. (Also June 26, 2:30 p.m.; June 30, 2:30 p.m. only.) Ends June 30. $33-$67. (213) 628-2772.

Judith Light...Allison

Cynthia Martells...Marta

Brienin Nequa Bryant...Rebecca

John Glover...Dawid

Written and directed by Athol Fugard. Set and costumes by Susan Hilferty. Lighting design by Dennis Parichy. Dialect consultant Stephen Gabis. Production stage managers Alison Cote, James T. McDermott.