Another Winner
From Athol Fugard

By Cynthia Citron

For Reviewplays.com
And iTunes at ww.airsla.org/broadcasts/theater_reviewsrss.xml



You might think that a 77-year-old playwright who has written a highly-acclaimed, prize-winning play (and sometimes two) nearly every year for 53 years might be running out of steam by now. Well, not so with South African/English/American playwright Athol Fugard, who has just written what, in my view, is the best work of his career. And that’s saying a lot for the man who wrote such blockbuster dramas as “The Blood Knot,” “Boesman and Lena,” “Sizwe Bansi is Dead,” “Master Harold and the Boys” and 2004’s “Exits and Entrances.”
“Coming Home,” Fugard’s latest play is now having its West Coast premiere at the theater that he calls his “artistic home in the United States”: The Fountain Theatre in West Hollywood. Once again, Stephen Sachs, co-artistic director of the Fountain, has taken on the pleasant task of directing Fugard’s play with one of the best teams of performers to be seen on any stage in a very long time.

The woman who is “Coming Home” is Deidrie Henry, who was so electrifying in the Pulitzer Prize-contending play “Yellowman” in 2002. Here again she is mesmerizing as Fugard’s heroine, Veronica Jonkers, who is returning to her childhood home after a futile decade in Capetown trying to succeed as a singer. (In real life, Henry’s sweetly melodic voice won her an Outstanding Vocalist award for her cabaret debut in New York.)

Veronica brings with her a son (played by Timothy Taylor as a five-year-old and Matthew Elam at 10) and striking memories of the years she spent in this dilapidated shanty with her loving grandfather, Oupa Jonkers (Adolphus Ward), and her childhood friend, Alfred Witbooi (Thomas Silcott), an exuberant man-child who is still brimming over with kindness and concern. In two extraordinary performances, the men, Ward and Silcott, match the phenomenal Deidrie Henry beat for beat. It’s a brilliant tour de force a trois right before your eyes.

Oupa, who has died and left his home to Veronica, turns up periodically as a wise old ghost, delivering, in one instance, a symphony in words about the life-affirming joy of planting a seed and watching it grow. Veronica, who has obviously learned much from his perennial optimism, is able to maintain a brave face even when she tells the sympathetic Alfred the sad tales of the life she had lived in Capetown before she came home.

“Coming Home” is a familiarly predictable tale, set in post-apartheid South Africa, when the newly freed peoples are beginning to realize that all their extravagant hopes and dreams for a bright new future are not going to be immediately forthcoming. But among this distinctive family, the dignity, the kindness, the love, and even the hope still remains.

“Coming Home” is set in a one-room tin-roofed shack designed by Laura Fine Hawkes that manages to be both wretched and homey at the same time. It’s a wonderful setting for this warm and beautiful play.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this play and its performers, and how emphatically I recommend it to you. If I were prone to rate these things, I would give it a firm five papayas! Or, as they call them in South Africa, five “paw-paws.”

“Coming Home” will continue at the Fountain Theatre, the home of always-outstanding productions, at 5060 Fountain Avenue, in Los Angeles, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 through August 29th. Call (323) 663-1525 for reservations.