Review Roundup: THE PAINTED ROCKS AT REVOLVER CREEK Opens Off-Broadway

Signature Theatre presents the world premiere of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, written and directed by Athol Fugard. The production opens tonight, May 11, in The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center, and runs through June 7.

The cast includes Bianca Amato (LCT's Macbeth) as Elmarie, Leon Addison Brown (Signature's The Train Driver) as Nukain, Caleb McLaughlin (The Lion King) as Bokkie, and Tony Award nominee Sahr Ngaujah (Fela!) as Jonathan.

Fugard returns with a new play suggested by the life of outsider artist Nukain Mabusa. Aging farm laborer Nukain has spent his life transforming the rocks at Revolver Creek, South Africa, into a vibrant garden of painted flowers. Now, the final unpainted rock, as well as his young companion Bokkie, has forced Nukain to confront his legacy as a painter, a person and a black man in 1980s South Africa. When the landowner's wife arrives with demands about the painting, the profound rifts of a country hurtling toward the end of apartheid are laid bare.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, The New York Times: "They got eyes but they do not see us," says the gentle old man to the young boy in "The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek," the tender, ruminative new play written and directed by Athol Fugard. Both man and boy are black South Africans, and the man's observation refers to the white farmers for whom he works. More broadly, of course, the words refer to the culture of apartheid, and the moral blindness on which it was based. Mr. Fugard has been anatomizing the evils of apartheid, and the troubling legacies it left behind, throughout his long and distinguished career. His new play...considers both the brutal injustices of apartheid and the violence that roiled South Africa after its dismantling...Waiting for the work to begin is pleasurable for us because Mr. Brown and the young Mr. McLaughlin bring such vibrancy to their characters. Slightly stooped, looking exhausted from a life largely led roaming the country trying to obtain work, Mr. Brown's Nukain nevertheless retains a softly glowing warmth that dims only when he considers the mystery of his inability to see the shape of this final "flower."

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: In a recent interview, Athol Fugard described himself as an "outsider artist"...there's no denying that this still vital 82-year-old South African playwright feels an affinity for such figures that is on ample display in his affecting new work...Featuring many of the themes familiar from his past plays, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek is an intimate theatrical gem...the play becomes a bit stilted and didactic, with Jonathan and Elmarie becoming engaged in a lengthy debate in which the post-apartheid themes are stated far too explicitly....But it's deeply moving nonetheless, with Fugard, who also directed, eliciting superb performances from his ensemble, especially Brown, who conveys Nukain's mixture of proud dignity and helpless subjugation with haunting poignancy. The production has its flaws -- the staging is too leisurely, and not all of the dialogue rings true. But the work, which Fugard has indicated may be his last, is a worthy addition to his distinguished canon.

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: A black South African farmworker in 1981, bent by the yoke of apartheid, Nukain Mabusa (Leon Addison Brown) expresses himself through outsider art, painting bright shapes onto stones in the arid countryside to create works he calls his "flowers." He applies his colors in broad strokes, and octogenarian writer-director Athol Fugard limns him with similar directness in The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, a fictional piece inspired by the real-life artist's oeuvre. Fugard has tallied the costs of apartheid in many important plays...and here he revisits that terrain. In the first act, a dying Mabusa tries to depict his journey though poverty and racism on the largest of the stones. When he does so, it is a triumph...Fugard's play, performed by an excellent cast of four, derives much of its initial power from simplicity.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: Fugard previously paid his respects to a South African outsider artist, the sculptor Helen Martins, in his 1985 play, "The Road to Mecca"...Like Martins, the artist identified here as Nukain (and played by the quietly imposing Leon Addison Brown) has had no formal training, but feels obliged to create works of art for some compelling personal reason he can't express...Watching the dead rock come to life is as thrilling for us as it is for Nukain, who, before our eyes, creates a primitive and powerful -- and very proud -- portrait of himself and his life...in the second act of his carefully built play, Fugard broadens the meaning of Nukain's masterpiece by placing that powerful symbol of a man's human dignity in a modern-day context.

Linda Winer, Newsday: Stories seem to topple from the imagination and memory of Athol Fugard -- simple stories that, before we know it, swell to become the rich, uneasy historical and personal journey of his country. So it is again, this time with "The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek"...except for the beautiful acting, tales of horrible violence and contrasting emotions about the country's new constitution. And from such simplicity, Fugard, once again, stamps indelible human faces on faraway reports of the world's news.

Elysa Gardner, USA Today: To sustain himself under apartheid, the character Nukain has been painting flowers on rocks for an Afrikaner couple, while living on their farm. But he has not approached this massive boulder, feeling intimidated by its size and imperviousness -- a reaction one might expect from a man who feels stripped of his land and his sense of dignity...There is also a problem with pacing in the first act, which takes a good 20 minutes to spring to life. Still, Fugard culls passionate and compelling performances from the actors, from Bianca Amato's steely but ultimately sympathetic Elmarie to the blazing precociousness of young Caleb McLaughlin's Bokkie. Sahr Ngaujah...brings both charisma and a refined sensitivity to the role of Jonathan, while Leon Addison Brown's palpably weathered, weary Nukain has moving flashes of vitality.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: South African playwright Athol Fugard has spent nearly six decades exploring his country's bitter divides. It's not that everybody suddenly reconciles in his new play, "The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek," but black and Afrikaner end up talking, if warily. The show was inspired by the true story of Nukain Mabusa, who for 20 years painted the rocks on the bush farm where he worked...The show can be repetitive -- Jonathan reminds us over and over how the Big One tells Nukain's story -- but it tackles the two sides' fear and anger in a surprisingly gentle way. Jonathan and Elmarie eventually reach a precarious peace, even as Fugard suggests the country's issues are too deep to be easily fixed.

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News: Being stuck between a rock and a hard place takes on new meaning in writer/director Athol Fugard's stirring new drama, "The Painted Rocks of Revolver Creek." Per usual, his setting is South Africa, but the play makes a universal point about racial and class conflict...Inspired by the life of Nukain Mabusa, an African farm laborer who painted stones in South Africa in the 1960s, Fugard's work is one of imagination. His play isn't ground-breaking, but his script has plainspoken eloquence and the cast is first-rate. You'd have to have a heart of granite not to be moved watching empathy tentatively bloom in a garden of rocks.

Jesse Green, Vulture: The action only really begins when he understands that The Big One is not meant to be a final flower among his hundreds but instead the story of his own life: an expression, before death, and regardless of the conditions that limited and degraded him as a black man in apartheid South Africa, of the fact that he lived...Watching him (and Bokkie) erupt with creative passion...I was reminded of a similar...moment in the John Logan's Red, when Mark Rothko...suddenly channeled a life's worth of conflict into a thrilling moment of abstract portraiture. Unfortunately, the painting of The Big One is the highlight of the Fugard play, which in Act Two jumps 22 years into the post-apartheid future to see what has grown from the politics so carefully planted beneath the aesthetics of Act One...You need artists of this stature to succeed in the very unpromising environment of The Painted Rocks, whose dialogue sounds like notes toward an ideology rather then expressions of it.

Brendan Lemon, Financial Times: Vision, and the lack of it, is one of the themes of this clear, touching, occasionally blunt two-act evening...Nukain, given great dignity by Leon Addison Brown, is about to paint the largest rock in his garden...The play's conflict between old and new South Africa is, like its central art work, is a bit too large and looming to make for easily contained drama. Fugard has directed assuredly, and the play's theme of artistic restoration suggests that this 82-year-old writer may be thinking about his own legacy. That gift is, I hope, secure, even if I confess to preferring another Fugard play about an "outsider artist", The Road to Mecca, to the new work.

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Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

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