`Hamlet,' Apartheid Compete in Fugard's Powerful Play `Exits'

By Jeremy Gerard

April 9 (Bloomberg) -- ``Exits and Entrances,'' which concludes Primary Stages' season at the attractive 59E59 complex in Manhattan, is atypical of its author, Athol Fugard. It's unabashedly sentimental; its politics sneak up on you; it's forward-looking and full of hope. Yet in just 85 minutes, it offers a skeleton key to Fugard's work.

``Exits'' is a three-character play, though only two appear on stage: Fugard himself, here called the Playwright, at the beginning of his career in the late fifties and early sixties; and the Afrikaans actor Andre Huguenet, already past the height of his powers when the young Fugard plays a small part and serves as his dresser in a 1956 staging of ``Oedipus Rex.''

Andre is the last of a breed whose life's purpose is to bring the classics to the unwashed masses. Fugard will become the playwright who gave voice to South Africa's disenfranchised majority under apartheid in such masterpieces as ``Sizwe Banzi is Dead,'' ```Master Harold' . . . and the Boys'' and ``A Lesson From Aloes.''

There are no surprises in ``Exits and Entrances'' -- it opens in 1961 with the Playwright reading a newspaper notice of Andre's death, and goes back in time from there. But there are plenty of revelations, many of the backstage sort familiar to anyone who has seen Ronald Harwood's ``The Dresser'' or read the Crummles section of Dickens's ``The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby'' or even seen ``The Fantasticks.''

Youthful Sponge

Each night Andre, flabby, barrel-chested and insecure, is transformed, with the help of a corset and tunic and the Playwright's ministrations, into something grandiloquent and sometimes even grand. The Playwright is a youthful sponge, taking in everything and slowly but irrevocably opening his eyes to all the misery Andre has shut out except his own.

They're affectingly played by William Dennis Hurley and Morlan Higgins. Higgins, whose voice changes effortlessly from whiny bleat to theater-filling baritone, is particularly wonderful as Andre. The play is staged with economy and power by Stephen Sachs, on Charlie Corcoran's minimal set (Brian Nason's nuanced lighting helps a great deal).

I mentioned a third character. It is the ghost of Eugene Marais, whom Andre encountered when he himself was young, during a brief stint as a drama critic. Marais -- prescient author of ``The Soul of the White Ant'' -- is eking out a living at the same paper, mostly to support his morphine habit.

Hamlet's Soliloquy

Late one night at the office, Andre tells the playwright during their last conversation, Marais delivers Hamlet's ``To be or not to be'' soliloquy, not as an actor but as a one who understands Hamlet's dilemma from the inside.

``Poor Eugene!,'' Andre tells the Playwright. ``He's been a lot in my thoughts lately. You see, Marais was so right. `To be or not to be' is not a literary conceit, it is a real question.

Andre then recites Hamlet's words perfectly himself, no longer as an actor's exercise but as the personal expression of a man's deepest inquiry into the purpose of life. This final revelation of Andre's, a gift to his protege, fits hand-in-glove with the Playwright's coming of age as an artist of conscience. And what might have been a mere valentine to a life in the theater concludes with a scene of great pathos.