BWW Review: “MASTER HAROLD”…and the Boys at Syracuse Stage

It is 1950, and on a rainy South African afternoon in the St. George’s Park Tea Room, Hally (Nick Apostolina) is becoming himself. He was a boy – one prone to arrogance and self-pity, certainly but vulnerable, and capable of sweetness and hope. But now he is becoming a man – a brutal man, “MASTER HAROLD”, who embraces the world’s ugliness and claims it as his own. He does this by spitting in the face of Sam (L. Peter Callender), a Black man who had sheltered him to that point from the world’s worst, including his own father. In this primal way Master Harold joins the oppressors as a way of not joining the oppressed.