Black Rep bears the burden of Athol Fugard in season opener
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
In his great anti-colonial and revolutionary manifesto The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon wrote that “no oppression is ever complete.” In Boesman and Lena, revered playwright Athol Fugard sets his play in the heart of apartheid South Africa. Fugard, although himself a virulent political opponent of the apartheid system, always tried to reveal to his audience the deeper meaning of a system that separated people according to the color of their skin.
Fugard began keeping notebooks in 1959, and this personal archive became the germs of his most important work.
In 1965 Fugard was driving along a rural road with two companions when they encountered a woman walking and carrying her meager belongings on her head. He and his companions stopped to give her a ride. She told them about the death of her husband three days earlier and the disappearance of her nine children.
At the end of the ride the woman exited the car and began to thank Fugard and his friends profusely. He knew that without their assistance she would have been still wandering the desolate road.
He writes, “In that cruel walk under the blazing sun, walking from all her life that she didn’t have on her head, facing the prospect of a bitter Karoo night in a drainpipe, in this walk there was no defeat – there was pain, and great suffering, but no defeat.” It was her walk that drove Fugard to write Boesman and Lena.
The play opens with Boesman and Lena arriving at the banks of the river Swartkops, after having been driven out of the shanty that was their temporary dwelling. Being chased from place to place is the central spiritual motif of their lives. They manifest the psychological disturbances and personal character destruction that comes with living the hard life of day laborers.
In one elegant and twisted tirade, Lena says, “Hey! Once you’ve put your life on your head and walked, you never get light again.”
The hearts here are twisted and at the same time incredibly vibrant. Fugard uses a poignant device to explain this paradox. It’s psychologically risky and socially controversial, but it works as a deep explanation for the complexity of the predator-to-prey relationship between Boesman and Lena: He presents spousal abuse as a perverse form of the universal need for love and the human will to affection.
Boesman is a brute. Lena is his mate. Indications are that they have been together for years. He has been abusing her during the extent of their relationship. His wife deploys intense language and even hallucinatory dream states to fulfill her humanity, but every time she returns to the real world the beast is waiting for her.
In the middle of the first act, Fugard introduces the old African as a counterweight to the turmoil and depression of Boesman and Lena. He is a kaffir (or a nigger, in the Afrikaans nomenclature of apartheid), the lowest of the low.
We see here another psychic break in the social infrastructure of the enslaved, one that rings as true in St. Louis as in apartheid South Africa – division of the oppressed by color consciousness, language and access to the so-called master class.
Boesman and Lena are constantly in contact with the “baas,” an Afrikaans word that means master. Although the baas beats them, burns their dwelling and then drives them into the constant insecurity of the road, they feel that any contact with the master gives them status in this twisted world.
Act II is focused on the material struggle for redemption. Lena and Boesman have almost nothing of consequence or value. Lena attempts to redeem herself through conversation with the old African. She constructs a dialogue of generosity and attempts to share a drink of water, a piece of bread, the suffering of a life of still-born children and abuse. When Boesman derides her attempt to build a human community with the old African, who is symbolic of a pre-colonial way of life, she sacrifices her life’s bread and her shelter (one blanket against the cold) to save the old man’s life.
Boesman never recognizes this old African. He rages against the world and continues to choose the hostility and vagaries of the road. Lena is made larger through their struggle. She could be even bigger if she abandoned him, but she will not. Boesman is still oppressed by the dark and relentless nightmare of his world, but he has Lena.
No oppression is ever complete.
The Black Rep’s 31st Season will open with Boesman And Lena September 12-23 at The Edison Theatre at Washington University, followed by a week of performances at the Orthwein Theatre at Mary Institute Country Day School. For tickets, call 534-3810 or visit theblackrep.org.
