Woe in a Muddy Basin

By T. E. K.

It may sound odd, but misery needs to be entertaining. Appalling calamities befall some people; yet they manage to make them sound drab and boring. Others possess the gift of making a minor mishap vividly compelling.

Unfortunately, Boesman and Lena is one of those accounts of unlimited woe that try the playgoer's patience. Boesman (James Earl Jones) and Lena (Ruby Dee) are pitiable South African Coloreds whom God and man have forsaken, and whose only shelter is some abandoned junk on the banks of a muddy river basin. Nature wheels around them like an impatient vulture, and death is the only consolation prize that their life has to offer.

Though the urge to survive cannot be quenched, it seems to bring out the worst in both of them. Boesman is a vicious brute who smashes at his own fate by punching Lena, a nagging termagant who could drive a much stronger man to despair. They tell each other off, but tell the audience very little, except for long, rambling, undramatized remembrances of their atrophied past.

South African Playwright Athol Fugard should bless his actors for breathing vitality into his stillborn script. James Earl Jones pours out his rage at existence like a volcanic river of fire, and Ruby Dee's face is one of those relief maps of pain, torment and humiliation that characterize a life when it is brutal, nasty and interminable. The pair ought to get a bonus in salvage pay.

. T. E. K.

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