ARTS REVIEW: 'TRAIN DRIVER'

Ninety Powerful Minutes Offering a Brief but Potent Look Into the Human Soul

By: Clare Elfman

October 26, 2010

(At the Fountain Theater in Hollywood, CA) For the crazed train driver and the old man who earns his pennies burying the nameless dead, a great bravo for a memorable performance. A must-see. For Athol Fugard’s conclusion (and he has been the voice of South Africa’s world after apartheid), a terrible sadness.

The stage is an ugly wide field of dirt -- a graveyard so bleak that there are no crosses, the graves marked only by junk: an old tire frame, an empty gas can.  These are the graves of the unknown, unidentified, unclaimed bodies of poor blacks of this South African town. An old black man, Simon, makes his few pennies  by burying these unwanted souls and watching over them from his pitifully bleak shack, making certain that the wild dogs don’t dig them up and eat them by night.

Into this scene stumbles a half-crazed white man. He is searching for the grave of a woman and child. He has been shunted from graveyard to graveyard.  And what sort of hellish place is this? Just little mounds of dirt marked with an old tire frame, a dented oil can…junk…and a few stones.  Simon says he can’t call attention to them. Grave robbers, and worse, he has to watch that the dogs don’t dig them up and eat them. What is the white man doing here? This is not the place for him.

But the searcher is crazed. Something terrible has possessed him. He is a train driver. He drove his train as usual through the town of broken-down shacks, never really seeing the terrible reality of life for these poor folk.  Suddenly, a woman carrying an infant steps in front of his train. He couldn’t stop! And before the wheels of the train ground her up, her eyes met his. He saw her eyes!  He must know who she is and how she could have been so without hope that she gave up her life and the life of her child to a speeding train.

Apartheid is finished by law, but the conscience of the white man is still quivering in distress without remedy. And the 90-minute encounter of Simon and Roelf begins as a meeting of two strangers from two worlds, and little by little, they find a deep understanding, a sense of connection -- the joining of two human hearts that first creates a bridge between their two worlds and ultimately paints a hopeless picture of a country which will never recover from its terrible wounds. The souls of the black man and the white man who had controlled him for so long will not heal.

The end of apartheid should have signaled hope. Roelf says that life is hope, that he cannot conceive of a life so hopeless that a woman would step on the train tracks with her baby on her back and give up her life to the oncoming train. And that, the play seems to tell us, is what the white South African cannot conceive: a world of poverty so totally hopeless.

As Roelf slowly begins to relate not only to Simon’s humanity but with the graves themselves -- he wants to take the stones and shape them in the form of a cross -- Simon says he can never find that woman and that child, but the next unnamed, unclaimed body he must bury himself. And in that way, he can be redeemed.

Only when he goes out that night to dig his grave of reconciliation, something happens. I invite you to see the scene for yourself and ask yourself what this playwright concludes about the future of these “now-reconciled” races.

The deeply moving encounter between these two men, excellently played by Morlan Higgens and Adolphus Ward, is touching and deeply affecting.  With Roelf, we live a gradual shift from a man driven wild by this horror of a suicide to a man who wants deeply to atone.

Fugard had read the true story of a mother who pulled her three children under a train. It stayed with him. He knew he had to write it. This play, he claims, is his most important. The conscience of Roelf may be the conscience of Fugold himself. He saw, he believed he understood, yet he did not understand the total meaningless of life for the underclass.

If you saw the film Invictus, the scene where the white athletes drive though that same town of tumble-down shacks, their first awareness, and then the final joyous scenes of black and white cheering together at the winning game, beautiful and idealistic, Train Driver is, sadly, the death of that romantic concept.

For a brief but potent look into the human soul, its sudden awakening, and the dreadful realities that follow the lifting of apartheid,  Train Driver is 90 powerful minutes of theater.

Fountain Theater

5060 Fountain Avenue

(323) 663-1525