Theatre in Review: The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (Signature Theatre)

	Leon Addison Brown and Caleb McLaughlin. Photo: Joan Marcus.

A large boulder occupies stage center of Christopher H. Barreca's set, and it is just about the only thing in Athol Fugard's new drama that remains untouched by the relentless march of time. The play's title refers to the work of Nukain, an elderly black farm laborer in rural South Africa, who has turned a nearby sandy ridge into a colorful garden filled with dozens of painted rocks. (For the record, Revolver Creek is a real place, and there was an artist named Nukain Mabuza, although Fugard, in a program note, says that the action of the play is his invention.) The effect, of a burst of colors cropping up in an arid, unforgiving landscape, is strangely beautiful and utterly original, an example of true outsider art.

As the play begins, Nukain is getting ready to face that boulder, which is to be both his swan song and crowning work. He candidly admits to being afraid of it, for, as opposed to the other rocks, which are covered with colorful abstract patterns, it will contain a kind of self-portrait, an iconic image of a human face filled with details that allude to various aspects of his life. Accompanied by Bokkie, a young boy attached to the same farm, they go about their work, creating a work of art that is far more striking -- and faintly disturbing -- than anything on the surrounding rocks.

Fugard is a painstaking craftsman, and even in this relatively short work -- which runs an hour and 45 minutes with intermission -- he takes his time establishing the loving master-apprentice relationship between Nukain and Bokkie. As a result, the first quarter of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is both charming and a little bit tedious; it also takes a few minutes to adjust to the characters' thick South African accents. Longtime viewers of Fugard plays know that it is wise to go along with him, however, because he usually has a brutal surprise in store, and so it is here. The scene is interrupted by the appearance of Elmarie, who, with her husband, owns the farm where Nukain and Bokkie live and work. She has indulged Nukain's project, seeing it as a decorative attachment to her prosperous land, but is frankly appalled at the new addition. Briskly, cheerfully, but in tones that brook no argument -- like a headmistress talking to recalcitrant children -- she orders that the new painting be washed away.

Sadly, it is 1981, and Nukain, although deeply distressed, has no recourse but to agree. Bokkie is furious, with the rage of a child who doesn't yet fully understand the rules that govern his world, and Nukain must explain to him the painful fact that Elmarie holds all the cards. (As he sorrowfully puts it, Elmarie and her husband are, when it comes to the blacks who work for them, unseeing, like the rock before they gave it a pair of eyes.) Bokkie talks back to Elmarie, who swiftly informs Nukain that the boy needs a beating with a belt -- an order that has a devastating effect on both man and boy. In a single brief scene, Fugard shows, in miniature, the twisted power dynamics of apartheid South Africa -- which are, if anything, exacerbated by Elmarie's patronizing mother-knows-best manner.

In Act II, it is 22 years later; in terms of South Africa's politics, eons have elapsed. A young black man, Jonathan, appears on the ridge, where he is met by a tense Elmarie, wielding a gun. We quickly learn that he is the grown-up Bokkie, who has returned on a mission to restore Nukain's painting. The ensuing years have dislodged Elmarie's sense of security; her husband has been crippled by a stroke, and her neighbors have been brutalized by a gang of black men. What starts as an armed standoff becomes a pained encounter between old friends and a summing-up of two turbulent decades, in which real, tangible progress has been accompanied by terrible displacements and unfulfilled promises.

Indeed, time does nearly everything to upend Jonathan and Elmarie's positions. After Nukain's death, the boy ran away to Zimbabwe, where he was educated and became a schoolteacher. Elmarie and her husband have seen their position erode to the point where they no longer feel welcome in their own country; indeed, she insists that there is "a deliberate plan to drive us off our land." She has little use for Jonathan's argument that crimes like those against her neighbors happen because "that is what hunger and anger and desperation have done" to the perpetrators.

Like Fugard's 1984 The Road to Mecca, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek deals with an artist whose very existence is seen as a challenge to the prevailing social order; both plays show Fugard's knack for portraying Afrikaners as pious, upright, morally correct folk who fail to grasp the appalling evil in front of their noses. The new play also demonstrates vividly how Calvinist theology leaves them utterly unprepared for the changes wrought by black majority rule. In this respect, Elmarie is one of his finest character portraits. There's a striking contrast between the self-satisfied landholder of Act I, who confidently quotes Psalm 23 ("He has led us beside still waters to green pastures") and the bitter, unhappy woman who says, "Read the Book of Job and you might understand something about us Afrikaners." She doesn't hesitate to inform Jonathan that black Africans should be thankful: "This land was a wilderness; we tamed it," she asserts. "You should be grateful that we stole it. Look what we did with it." Gently, but with fatal accuracy, Jonathan informs her that recent history has profoundly shaken "the central belief of Afrikaner mythology: that you are a chosen people."

There's much more to their thorny, complex arguments -- including an acknowledgment of the violence that sometimes runs wild in South Africa and the disappointment of black rule in countries like Zimbabwe ("Mugabe, the liberator was turning into Mugabe, the monster.") And, under Fugard's meticulous direction, Sahr Ngaujah and Bianca Amato invest every word of Jonathan and Elmarie's debate with life-or-death urgency. There is also fine work from Leon Addison Brown as Nukain, especially when he must stand before Bokkie in all his powerlessness, and Caleb McLaughlin, whose Bokkie's anger is the authentic rage of an uncomprehending child.

Everything else about the production contributes to the play's quietly stunning impact. Barreca's set is beautiful in is natural austerity, and poignant in the second act, when only traces of Nukain's work remain. Thanks to Stephen Strawbridge's lighting, you will swear you feel the heat of a South African afternoon. Susan Hilferty's costumes draw a telling contrast between Elmarie's first-act outfit, a flowery summer dress, and her second-act gear, a pair of pants, shirt, and flak jacket. Stowe Nelson's sound design includes such ambient noises as the cawing of crows and the flapping of bird wings.

In the early passages of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, I feared that Fugard was setting up his situation in too neat and pat a manner, as if determined to teach us all a lesson. I couldn't have been more wrong. Now in his 80s, he continues to combine incisively drawn characters and situations with a commanding moral voice. This is a small play in some ways, but it contains a multitude of ideas about the still-undecided fate of a nation. -- David Barbour