Asbury Park Press
REVIEW
"Exits" enters from a left-coast stage
June 1, 2006
 

BY TOM CHESEK
CORRESPONDENT

There are a number of pin-drop moments that occur during "Exits and Entrances," the two-character Athol Fugard drama now onstage at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.

They are moments in which a hush settles over the room, broken by nothing more or less than a couple of finely tuned actors performing some carefully wrought words — with the subdued lighting, the barely discernible hum of the house air conditioning and some comfortable new seats adding to the quiet-time power of this elegiac duet.

There's little in the way of real action in this 2004 play by the South African scribe who's been lauded as one of the greatest literary voices of the last fifty years. Branded a "memory play," it's essentially a couple of snapshots from a slow, sad changing of the guard — a crossing of paths between the aging, Afrikaner actor Andre Huguenet (Morlan Higgins) and an idealistic young playwright (William Dennis Hurley) who has occasion to serve as supporting player, de facto dresser and appreciative audience to the older man.

This most recent work from the pen of the playwright best known for "Master Harold . . . and the Boys" was written for and developed by director Stephen Sachs and his Fountains Theatre in Los Angeles, a premiere for which Fugard helped supervise the casting and lent his wisdom during the rehearsal process. With director Sachs and his original cast all present for the show's Long Branch engagement, the NJ Rep production of "Exits" comes to the Jersey Shore bearing its famous author's still-warm fingerprints.

Arrivals and departures

Introduced by the unnamed Playwright (a surrogate for you-know-who) on the 1961 inauguration of the Republic of South Africa — an occasion that synchronically coincides with the death of Huguenet — the play very quickly flashes back to 1956 and the aspiring literary lion's experience with the weary Andre during an ill-starred run of "Oedipus Rex." The gradual "exit" of the classically trained, old-school impresario — and the concurrent "entrance" of the Playwright's more immediate brand of socially relevant theater — are just some of the "arrivals and departures" noted by Fugard, not least of which are the passing of the old Union of South Africa amid the first stirrings of the forces that would transform his country's society a generation later.

Always among the most trenchant of observers of life in the Apartheid era, Fugard keeps the grand sweep of history offstage, channeling the sea-change currents into a more personal argument between the hidebound conservator of Afrikaner culture and the wordsmith out to change the world. It's an exchange that momentarily wrests the jaded actor from his boozy resignation, prompting him to call his young friend back for more with the plea that "we haven't exhausted all our points of disagreement."

Comings and goings

While NJ Rep is presenting "Exits" without an intermission, the script does fall into two distinct sections. The latter finds the Playwright looking up the all-but-forgotten Andre in a small-time production of "The Prisoner," in which the broken, bankrupt Huguenet's gut-wrenching turn as The Cardinal presents a proud man "slowly stripped of all his disguises . . . forced to recognize and confess to what he really is."

Once regarded as the greatest actor in all of South Africa, the real-life Huguenet was a specialist in such larger-than-lifes as Hamlet and Lear. In a role that he has every right to claim having "created," Higgins embodies Huguenet as a sardonically witty extension of his stage self, a sin-eater who seems to assume the burdens shouldered by every tragic figure he's ever portrayed. As imperious as he is insecure, claiming to have "bred antibodies" to the critics while pouring another few fingers of bottled courage, the self-proclaimed "old gay ham" stands exposed as a lifelong outsider, a dinosaur with no real friends. Whether relating his childhood epiphany at the sight of the great ballerina Pavlova, or delivering Hamlet's famous soliloquy with a world-weary, booze-bleary authority you'll likely hear nowhere else, Higgins delivers this portrait to places only skirted by the likes of "The Dresser" and other "backstage" tales.

In a considerably less showy role — one that the playwright didn't seem fit to bless with a name — Hurley endeavors to expertly balance rather than compete with the stentorian swaggers and staggers of Higgins. He's the eloquent narrator who frames the vignettes, a straight-man and interlocutor, a stand-in for author and audience alike. He makes this play happen every bit as much as his 800-pound gorilla of a co-star.

The two actors and their director have honed this show to a fine point over the course of four productions and scores of performances. While it's not for every taste, it's a welcome summer guest here on our fair Shore — and to see it is to be provided with a direct glimpse into the creative process of one of the world's greatest living playwrights.