Theatre in Review: "Master Harold"...and the Boys (Signature Theatre/Irene Diamond Stage)

	Sahr Ngaujah, Noah Robbins, Leon Addison Brown. Photo: Monique Carboni

Try as I might, I cannot think of a more unsparing self-portrait than the one offered by Athol Fugard in "Master Harold"...and the Boys, and it is rendered in harrowing detail by Noah Robbins. The actor, who is in his mid-twenties, effortlessly melts into the role of 16-year-old Harold, aka Hally, a troubled young man who adopts a pose of intellectual superiority as a way of keeping a lid on his turbulent emotions. From the moment he enters the tearoom, in Port Elizabeth (near Cape Town, South Africa), on a rainy day in 1950, we see how tormented he is -- and how much damage he is capable of inflicting.

Hally has stopped off at the tearoom, which is owned by his mother, to finish his schoolwork before heading home. He also casually oversees Sam and Willie, the two black men who take care of the shop. In a way, the men are like family to Hally, having worked there for years; Sam, in particular, takes a fatherly interest in the boy. There is, at first, an easy familiarity among all three, even if Hally tends to lecture them with the fruits of his wide reading. Sam and Willie both take part in ballroom dancing competitions and Hally, joking with them, predicts success for them both. But before things get too sentimental, the playwright has some jarring news to deliver: A lengthy, lyrical passage recalls the kite Sam once made for Hally. It was a poor thing, to be sure. Hally describes it: "Tomato-box wood and brown paper! Flour and water for glue! Two of my mother's old stockings for a tail, and then all those bits and pieces of string you made me tie together so that we could fly it!" And yet, when it took flight, Hally says, "It was the most splendid thing I'd ever seen!" Then he adds, "The sheer audacity of it took my breath away. I mean, seriously, what the hell does a black man know about flying a kite?"

That this comment, with its toxic blend of casual racism and paternalism, goes unnoticed tells you all you need to know about the social climate of the South Africa of the 1950s. It is particularly shocking because Fugard has so carefully laid the groundwork for it, letting us spend time with Sam and Willie before Hally shows up, giving us a sense of who they are before exposing them to words so disparaging they can make you gasp. This is a world -- that existed until not so long ago -- where a teenager can casually deny a middle-aged man's dignity without a second thought.

Sam, who, in Leon Addison Brown's commanding performance, is a figure of tremendous warmth and intelligence, lets it pass, partly out of affection for Hally and partly because he has no other recourse. But things will become much uglier as the unhappy facts of Hally's family life are laid bare. At the moment, Hally's father is in the hospital, an arrangement that suits the boy just fine, as he is sick to death of the crippled, alcoholic older man who steals from his wife and son and must be tended to like an invalid. (In one passage, Hally describes in searing detail having to empty his father's chamber pot, the physical and emotional revulsion coming together in a single image.) We see Hally on the phone with his mother, frantically demanding that she keep him in the hospital so they can enjoy a few more days of tranquility. Then his father gets on the phone and Hally, torn by guilt and anger, changes course, pretending to be chums with him and feigning elation over his imminent release. Conflicting emotions play across Robbins' face as he tells one lie after another, revealing the terrible spot that he inhabits -- forced into dishonesty just to keep the peace, yet eaten up with rage over it.

What happens next is terrible in its inevitability. Raised to see blacks as less than fully human, Hally offloads his fury on Sam, his substitute father figure and the only man who has ever shown him any tenderness or understanding. Sam and Willie have been helping Hally with a composition, in which he is to describe a local cultural event; they have been filling him in on the details of their ballroom competition. (Sam describes it as "like being in a dream about a world in which accidents don't happen." As Hally puts it, "In strict anthropological terms, the culture of a primitive black society includes its dancing and singing. To put my thesis in a nutshell: Your war-dance has been replaced by the waltz.") He coolly tears the paper in half, an act of destruction that means so much more than first appears. "My mother is right. She's always warning me about allowing you to get too familiar," Hally says. "Well, this time you've gone too far. It's going to stop right now." He tells a terrible racist joke, insisting that he and his father had a good laugh over it. He also demands that, from now on, he be called Master Harold, a symbolic breach of his intimacy with Sam that will destroy a love that has managed to thrive inside the cracks of an unjust society. Sam acquiesces, but, before he is through, he will have exposed the roots of Hally's fury in all its shame; as it happens, the truth, quietly spoken, is a far more terrible weapon than any humiliation the boy can dole out.

If Robbins embodies the powder keg of emotional conflicts that drive Hally, Leon Addison Brown is a tower of humanity, taking in Hally's meltdown with all-seeing eyes, yet not flinching from brutal honesty when it is needed. I won't describe the terrible gesture he makes following the boy's ultimate act of derision. But he also reminds Hally -- quietly, but in unsparing terms -- of the event that preceded the making of that kite: How man and boy dragged home the boy's father, passed out cold, in his own filth, from a bar. (He also notes in passing that Hally had to beg the bar's owner to let him in.) The kite, so fondly and foolishly remembered, was Sam's gesture toward helping Hally learn to be a decent man.

There's much more, all of it rendered in stunning detail under Fugard's direction. The playwright typically takes his time, filling in details about his characters before springing his trap, but here the time goes by quickly, thanks to the sterling work of Brown and Sahr Ngaujah, as Willie. The playwright doesn't sentimentalize his black characters -- Willie, for one, has lost his dance partner because he has hit her once too often -- a strategy that makes what happens all the more shattering. All three actors are superbly skilled in the art of listening, allowing the play's many arias to take flight. And for all the understanding that he grants Hally, he doesn't spare him from being judged for what he does.

The success of the play hinges on our feeling that we are in another time and place where different rules apply, which is why Christopher H. Barreca's tearoom set -- a utilitarian space with little notes of cheer, fronted by large windows that reveal storm and fog outside -- is such an important achievement. Stephen Strawbridge's lighting is filled with subtle modulations that help to shape the drama. Susan Hilftery's costumes are filled with small, but important, observations: Consider how much more of a man Sam appears to be when wearing a sports jacket, with its long lines, as opposed to his waiter's coat, which is cut only to the waist. John Gromada's sound design includes some storm effects and period band music; the play ends with the jukebox playing a recording of Sarah Vaughan singing "Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day."

"Master Harold"...and the Boys ends with the faint suggestion that Hally and Sam may yet find a way forward, a faint ray of mercy in a drama that might otherwise be too terrible to watch. The agony is real: Fugard long ago admitted that the play is based on an incident from his youth, which tormented him for decades until he put pen to paper. (The play was first produced in 1982.) Out of the pain has come a masterpiece; I certainly hope that the playwright can now consider his debt paid in full. -- David Barbour