STAGE REVIEW : Stark Lesson of ‘Aloes’ Still Burns Deep

Times may be changing rapidly in South Africa, but the recently altered course of its politics does not lessen the impact of Athol Fugard’s 1979 “A Lesson From Aloes” one jot.

On the contrary. As the production that opened Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse abundantly demonstrates, the perspective from here on a play set in 1963--three years after the Sharpeville massacre, one year after the incarceration of Nelson Mandela during one of the grimmest periods of apartheid history--is only strengthened by its focus on changeless emotional truths.

They are the key to the shattering power of so many Fugard plays. By invoking these truths, he particularizes the general, illustrating political tragedy by zeroing in on the devastation of the individual trapped within it. And as he proved at La Jolla last year with his “My Children! My Africa!,” Fugard knows the human heart like the South African map.

The lesson in “Aloes” is simple but potent: Mistrust is its own instrument of destruction. Once bred, there is no rooting it out.

Piet Bezuidenhout and his wife, Gladys, live on the edge of society and the desert, outside Port Elizabeth. He is an Afrikaner with anti-apartheid sympathies and she’s an apolitical woman descended from English settlers.

This afternoon, they are waiting. She sits very still in the sun, while he mindlessly chatters and busies himself with his plants--a collection of spiny, bitter aloes, succulent survivors of the desert that Gladys can’t abide. All is uneasy between them. The conversation is forced, stilted, expectant.

What they expect is a visit from Piet’s friend Steve Daniels and Steve’s family. These will be the first guests Piet and Gladys have had in some time. In a series of small eruptions, we discover that recent political turns have plunged Piet and Gladys into involuntary isolation and triggered a nervous breakdown in Gladys. Steve’s visit is provocative. Rather than reassure her, it is causing Gladys to again teeter on the edge.

“A Lesson From Aloes” is about friendship and betrayal and being defenseless in a system so wracked with suspicion and distorted by fear that anyone can be suspect. But it is also about the mutual examination that that kind of doubt can unleash within a marriage. Or a friendship.

Fugard himself has staged this revival and is giving his first West Coast performance as an actor in the role of Piet--a subdued, moody, sensitive portrayal of a man betrayed by life and impotent to stop the consequent disintegration around him.

If Piet is the object of this play, Gladys is its subject. This is her story, to drive and mold at will, and Maria Tucci, who created the role in 1980 at the Yale Repertory Theatre and on Broadway, re-creates it here in an excoriating, disturbed and disturbing performance that brands itself onto the play’s consciousness. Morally violated, she is by turns deceptively tranquil, coiled or relentlessly probing as she hangs on to sanity by a tenuous thread.

Stirring this pot in the long-awaited second act is an ebullient and prepossessing Bennet Guillory as Steve, the coloured chum with a keen sense of awareness, desperately trying to triangulate his position in the world and in this friendship. His arrival detonates a series of painful but purifying explosions. The three are dynamite together. But there is no comfortable resolution to this play, only resignation to adjacent worlds in which are large quotients of torment and no peace.

Production values in this La Jolla staging are subdued by Playhouse standards, but just right for the play. For this writer, who previously had been exposed to “A Lesson From Aloes” only in a weak 1981 Los Angeles production at the Mark Taper Forum, this superbly calibrated edition is also an adventure in play rediscovery.

Its symbolism may be somewhat overstated (the final image of Piet staring at his baby aloes courts melodrama), but nothing about this play is dated. The power of the central message, which has more to do with the politics of trust than the politics of politics, is timeless and universal.

Every once in a while there is a glimmer of Samuel Beckett in Fugard. Never more so than here.

* “A Lesson From Aloes,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 29. $21-$29; (619) 534-3960, TDD/Voice, (619) 534-0351. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘A Lesson From Aloes’

Maria Tucci: Gladys Bezuidenhout

Athol Fugard: Piet Bezuidenhout

Bennet Guillory: Steve Daniels

Writer-director Athol Fugard. Associate director Susan Hilferty. Sets Susan Hilferty, Douglas Stein. Lights Dennis Parichy. Costumes Andrea Singer. Stage manager Sandra Lea Williams. Assistant stage manager Debbie Falb. Vocal coach Susan Leigh.