Violated Souls

By T.E.K.

A LESSON FROM ALOES

Athol Fugard has earned his credentials as the dramatic conscience of South Africa. For two decades he has audited the cruel costs of apartheid. Though he is white, Fugard does not confine himself to the barbarities visited by state policy upon the blacks and the mixed bloods who are labeled "coloreds." He indicts the impoverishment of spirit and the warping distortion of moral energy that engulf whites as well as blacks.

Fugard's latest drama concerns violated souls: three people who have been reduced to the bleak courage of despair. The aloe is a prickly outcast of a plant. Piet Bezuidenhout (Harris Yulin) sees in it the alchemy of survival. He is himself a spiny outcast, having been ostracized by his erstwhile comrades in the antiapartheid movement as a suspected informer.

Piet's wife Gladys (Maria Tucci) lives in the fragile limbo of a mind that has broken its moorings. She regards the confiscation of her personal diaries in a police raid as a spiritual rape, and has precariously survived mental therapy. Piet and Gladys nostalgically anticipate the visit of Steve Daniels (James Earl Jones), one of the valiant veterans of the antiapartheid causer as a healing family reunion. But it turns out to be a conflagration of doubt, rage, lost love, recrimination and remorse.

Despite a trio of transcendent performances and occasional moments of mercurial passion, A Lesson from Aloes is curiously stillborn. Fugard relies far too relentlessly on talk, the inspissated venom of the impotent. It is as if his cha acters were constantly grappling fate at the tonsils, rather than grabbing it by the throat.

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