Newsday

To be or not to be: A friend's final act

BY SAM THIELMAN

Special to Newsday

April 6, 2007

With a furrowed brow, bushy eyebrows neatly groomed and the dark strands along his Dracula hairline slicked back against his skull, fading actor André stands, towering and ridiculous in a short purple tunic, shin guards, gauntlets and greasepaint. His black lace-up girdle is hidden from view. The lights suddenly change and the huge man screams and clutches his face, pulling at his eye sockets: It's the denouement of "Oedipus Rex."

Writer Athol Fugard ("'Master Harold' ... and the Boys") remembers the twilight of his friend André Huguenet in his play "Exits and Entrances." Fugard's accomplishment here is so subtle that it's possible to miss it completely: André (Morlan Higgins) feels himself suffering "the calamity of too-long life," and when he talks about himself to The Playwright (William Dennis Hurley), it's sad, but he couldn't be more banal. When he appears in character as Oedipus, or in the Bridget Boland drama "The Prisoner," however, André is lit from within by something that he can't even begin to express when he's offstage. As the captive Cardinal in "The Prisoner," he seems to have been cleaning the floors for so long that his mind is beginning to fall apart. As Oedipus, his wounded pride broadcasts an anguish that can only get out of him through the magic of typecasting.

In between these scenes of suffering, André and The Playwright talk about the ways in which the South African government and the theater scene are variously being rebuilt and falling apart. The Playwright feels his social conscience stinging him towards theater, but André dissents when he hears the unappealing description of his friend's newest play. "The world is ugly enough as it is, for heaven's sake. People go to the theater to be elevated above its squalor and filth, not to have it thrown in their faces."

André's own elevation is all too temporary. After years of shame over his sexuality, and with bleak career prospects, André gives his last performance to an audience of one, as The Playwright sits, rapt and unknowing. André delivers Hamlet's third soliloquy as a suicide note - the question is whether or not to be, and he is going to make an answer. Only afterwards does The Playwright realize what happened. "There is a moment in 'The Prisoner' when the Cardinal says to his interrogator, 'I am not, you know, beloved. I am not a likable man.' André said it on stage with a note of such quiet and such unshakable conviction, you just knew he believed it was true of himself." He pauses, stricken. "He was wrong."

It's to Higgins' credit, and director Stephen Sachs, that André is able to deliver his complex classical monologues so effectively. With "Exits and Entrances," Fugard pays tribute not just to his friend, but to the generosity of the great tragedies from which he borrows to tell the story. Those plays are so wealthy with language that they easily can lend a little of their gravitas to Fugard for a compact 90-minute elegy.