'The Painted Rocks' move, gradually
NEW YORK -- The dominant figure in Athol Fugard's The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (*** out of four stars) is an inanimate object.
"The Big One" is what Nukain, one of the three human beings we meet in the play, calls the enormous rock that sits atop a small hill in South Africa's Mpumalanga Province. We are introduced to the old black man – who shares his name with Nukain Mabusa, an artist whose life and work "suggested" (in Fugard's words) Revolver Creek – in 1981, days before his death.
To sustain himself under apartheid, the character Nukain has been painting flowers on rocks for an Afrikaner couple, while living on their farm. But he has not approached this massive boulder, feeling intimidated by its size and imperviousness – a reaction one might expect from a man who feels stripped of his land and his sense of dignity.
A Signature Theatre Company's world premiere production of the play, which opened off-Broadway Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Center – under Fugard's direction – consists of two short acts, running about 100 minutes with an intermission. In the first, we see Nukain overcome his fear in a burst of inspiration, as the young boy who follows him around watches in awe and joyfully assists.
We then witness the very different response of Elmarie, the white woman who runs the farm with her husband. She reappears in Act Two, set in the same place in 2003, and is forced to confront the boy, whom Nukain called Bokkie -- now a grown man, who calls himself Jonathan.
Jonathan has returned to South Africa from the neighboring country he fled to after Nukain died, a place that embraced and educated him. He is drawn back home as much by the past as the promise of a post-apartheid future. There's also the troubled present, the unrest that has emerged as a long-oppressed people grapple with equality. Elmarie tells Jonathan of white neighbors who have been attacked, one fatally.
If Fugard approaches their difficult, balanced conversation with predictable intelligence and compassion, it feels longer than the clock suggests. There is also a problem with pacing in the first act, which takes a good 20 minutes to spring to life.
Still, Fugard culls passionate and compelling performances from the actors, from Bianca Amato's steely but ultimately sympathetic Elmarie to the blazing precociousness of young Caleb McLaughlin's Bokkie.
Sahr Ngaujah, who won wide praise playing the title role in the musical Fela!, brings both charisma and a refined sensitivity to the role of Jonathan, while Leon Addison Brown's palpably weathered, weary Nukain has moving flashes of vitality.
Nukain's final work of art, Jonathan tells Elmarie, offered "his story for others to read in the only language he knew." And traces of it endure on that mighty rock, their different colors still struggling for harmony.