Presented by and at the Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43 St., NYC, Feb. 4-24.
"Sorrows and Rejoicings" is the latest of Athol Fugard's agonized explorations of how the recent history of South Africa has devastated the lives of its people. Dawid, its central character, is an Afrikaner poet and anti-apartheid activist who has gone into exile with his white wife, leaving his black servant-mistress to polish his long table of native stinkwood with her tears. When he finally comes home to the new, post-apartheid South Africa, it is to die of terminal leukemia. We only meet Dawid in flashbacks, however. The play begins shortly after his funeral, when his wife and his mistress return to his house to talk over old times.
Dramatizing a story retrospectively, devoting a play to the ferreting out of what has already happened, has a long and honorable history—think of "Oedipus the King," Ibsen's "Ghosts," or the works of Agatha Christie. But in those plays, the past is the focus of a tremendous struggle in the present; in "Sorrows and Rejoicings," hardly anything happens in the present until the 95-minute play is nearly over. Fugard seems to have very little interest in how the two women feel about each other. Even when Dawid's sullen illegitimate daughter finally breaks her silence in a fierce onslaught against the father she hated and the mother who endured him, the play does not come to life—perhaps because, while Dawid is supposed to be a gifted, magnetic, tragically destroyed idealist, Fugard has actually written him as a self-indulgent, self-important windbag. John Glover's over-the-top performance, under the author's direction, doesn't help. What makes "Sorrows and Rejoicings" endurable are the intense performances—also, of course, under the author's direction—by Judith Light (wife), Charlayne Woodard (mistress), and Marcy Harriell (daughter).
Set and costumes by Susan Hilferty and lighting by Dennis Parichy are entirely professional, and praise is due also to Stephen Gabis, the dialect coach.