Pay no attention to the dead man downstage. “Only a Kaffir,” sniffs Lena (Zainab Jah), using the word that’s now widely considered South Africa’s worst racist slur.
So, after the final bows of Boesman and Lena at the Signature Theatre, the stagehands cover him with a dirty piece of plastic and start sweeping the floor around his motionless body. In fact, the poor man (the actor is Thomas Silcott) doesn’t even get a bow. Or a name, for that matter. Playwright Athol Fugard simply refers to him as Old African, and describes him as “a Black man.” How can a life be so worthless?
I realize I’ve just given away a significant plot point, but a formidable sense of doom hovers over Yaël Farber’s demanding production of Boesman and Lena. Just look at the title characters walking down the aisles of the theater: Boesman (Sahr Ngaujah), lugging milk crates, tattered sleeping pads, and overstuffed plastic bags; and Lena, balancing a washbasin, blankets, and bundle of twigs atop her head, arms laden with clanging buckets, pots, and pans. Or their destination: the sad, almost-bare dirt-covered stage, with a single Waiting for Godot–style tree to offer them shelter—i.e., the mudflats of the Swartkops River. “This piece of world is rotten,” observes Lena. They were driven out of their last shanty suddenly, and she’s not happy with her new sludge-soaked surroundings. “Blame the whiteman. Bulldozer!” she laughs bitterly. “It was funny, hey, Boesman! All the shanties flat. The poor people running around trying to save their things. You had a good laugh. And now? Here we sit.” She feels like “something that’s been used too long. The old pot that leaks, the blanket that can’t even keep the fleas warm. Time to throw it away.”
And Lena isn’t the only one who sees herself as disposable. According to Boesman, “we’re whiteman’s rubbish.… Why do you think we sit here like this? We’ve been thrown away.” The Old African? He’s detritus as well—but of a lower order. “He’s not brown people, he’s black people!” Boesman snaps to Lena. She snaps right back: “They got feelings too.” Remember: We are in apartheid-era South Africa. (Boesman and Lena premiered there in 1969 with Fugard in the role of Boesman; the 1970 New York premiere starred James Earl Jones and Ruby Dee, plus Zakes Mokae as the Old African.)
Ngaujah—so terrific as the tender-hearted ballroom-dancing waiter Willie in the Signature’s 2016 Fugard-directed revival of Master Harold… and the Boys—turns in a frighteningly good performance as the bullying Boesman, all fire, fists, and fury. Meanwhile, Jah (Eclipsed, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play) is every inch his match and more; Lena spends a good chunk of the play talking to the Old African, who responds to her in Xhosa—which she doesn’t speak. “Imini yonke, ubusuku bonke. Ndilahlekile. Ndidiniwe!” he pleads. (Translation: All day, all night. I’m lost. I’m tired!) At first, she’s frustrated. “Stop that baboon language!” she huffs. Yet slowly, eventually, the two characters somehow establish a brief, ever-so-tentative bond. But he was “only a Kaffir”…right?
Boesman and Lena opened Feb. 25, 2019, at the Pershing Square Signature Center and runs through March 17. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
