Coming Home

The cast of Athol Fugard’s Coming Home (currently at the Fountain Theater in Hollywood) is so excellent, the performances so true and so nuanced, that the play is a must-see.

A young woman brings her six-year-old son “home” to the dusty, scrubby shack where she lived as a child. The place: a small village in South Africa. Why she returned, this handsome woman (a talented singer, as she performs for her son and charms us with her music), we do not yet know. Deidre Henry is Veronica, and she is simply showing her young son the charm of her childhood home. (The six-year-old bravely performed by a very young and very professional Timothy Taylor.)

Bursting into the scene is a childhood friend who has come to return the household pots and pans he saved for her when her father died and the villagers came to ransack the place.  The friend is the village joke — slow-witted, illiterate, played to heartbreak perfection by Thomas Silcott. Veronica’s father allowed him to help plant the crops.  His only dream is to own a red bicycle.

What Silcott does with this role is amazing — a child-man but a fully conceived character who is confused when Veronica asks him to marry her. He is non-sexual and without understanding that something is terribly wrong with her — she has come home to die and needs someone to take care of her son. In the later scenes, the boy (now 14) is played by Matthew Elam, and bravo for his portrayal of an angry adolescent who refuses to accept his mother’s illness — a bright kid who resents the intrusion of this slow-witted friend.

Entering the scene is the ghost of the father with his world-wisdom and deeply philosophic monologues. Adolphus Ward speaks of the deep meaning of the seeds he plants, of life’s cycle. He’s a wonder to watch and to hear — the beauty of his delivery of Fugard’s philosophy.

Athol Fugard has been called the Tennessee Williams of South Africa. As to language and intensity of relationship, who would deny it?  But Fugard is also involved in “cause,” this time the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa — a country which hands out faulty condoms and withholds medication from the poor and afflicted.

Fugard, in an earlier play, Valley Song, told the story of Veronica and her dream of leaving this rural village for a chance to find fame in the big city. Now a broken, dispirited and mortally ill Veronica comes home to die. Less believable and less satisfying is the plot-line in which the loving but slow-witted “husband” has withheld a crime…would be a spoiler to say more.

Coming Home, despite a few debatable plot flaws, you may agree or not, brings credit to the Fountain Theater, which is one of L.A.’s best. Good, solid, well-directed plays and a small stage so intimate that the audience is drawn into the emotional interactions.

Not to be missed.