BWW Reviews: MCT's THE TRAIN DRIVER Presents Fugard's Masterful Prayer for Humanity

A master playwright, Athol Fugard, presents one of his mastepieces at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Midwest Premiere of The Train Driver. When the 2010 play opened this weekend in the Studio Theatre, the intimate stage created an intense conversation between the audience and two astounding actors, American Players Theatre's David Daniel and Chicago's accomplished Michael A. Torrey. These veteran professional masters bring Fugard's darkest revelations buried in his script to the surface of the human conscience.

The train driver Roelf Visagie, Daniel, and the gravedigger Simon Hanabe,Torrey, carry the production's desolate conditions in 2001 South Africa to a squatter's graveyard. Roelf searches in vain for a woman with a baby on her back who dies when she stepped on the tracks in front of his train. Simon who buries the "ones without a name," seeks to remember where he placed the nameless women, to ease Roelf's depression from kiling the woman and her baby. Based on actual events that happen regularly in South Aftica when their trains run, squatters intentionally step in front of the tracks because their future appears hopeless. A plight Roelf internalizes when he put his feelings into words as he tells Simon, "When he looked into her [the women's} eyes as hopeless as these graves."

Directed with deft sensitivity by C. Michael Wright, Daniel and Torrey develop a tentative friendship, an understanding between two opposites, in skin color and lifestyles. Daniel delivers his monologues with evocative depth while Torrey revels in one word sentences revealing 1000 emotions in a single word to punctuate Daniel's musings. Sorrow played out on Lisa Schlenker's stage set with a primitive shelter, sand and wire fences. These contrasts heighten the tension in Fugard's play, and the audience descends into the graveyard of nameless humaity.

Perhaps during this profound play, Fugard reminds his audiences that billions of people living throughout the world remain nameless, living in poverty, intolerable conditions, and like the woman with the baby, no one will claim them as their own. Unless like Roelf they finally can look directly into their eyes, understand their hopelessness, and then attempt to relieve their suffering.

The actual historical incident occurred two weeks before Christmas and Fugard depicts Roelf explaining how he destroyed his family Christmas tree one night because of his obsession with the tragic incident. Revisiting this time frame, the audience might be referred back to another mother and child, Mary and Jesus, who also went unclaimed when the baby boy was born, left to squat in a dirty manger among cow, donkey and sheep dung, with only Joseph to attend to them. A child born to die, sacrifice his life, perhaps symbolized by the crosses Roelf places on top of the graves to honor these souls instead of the discarded junk Simon uses to remember where he buried them.

The one unknown Jewish baby was supposedly born to bring a future, a resting place in heaven to any nameless, unclaimed persons, a tenant represented when Fugard has Roelf quote the BIble's Beatitudes when he says "The meek shall inherit the earth," similarly as the "poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of heaven." Whether based on class, ethnicity, skin color, gender or sexual orientation, Fugard's The Train Driver explores the desperate conditions society ignores, or tolerates, and what responsibility human beings have for each other despite these differences---To claim the namelss, even if only one at a time, to offer these disenfranchised and persecuted persons gifts of hope.

MCT's miraculous The Train Driver radiates difficult, humbling experiences that transforms a 90-minute, no intermission evening into a semi-spiritual experience. Fugard offers to his audience an anguished poetic theatrical prayer for those nameless and unclaimed persons who are indeed worthy of hope and a future, Those in the audience must choose whether to answer and honor Fugard's prayer, offered in earnest perfection through the voices of Daniel and Torrey, by claiming even one nameless person, perhaps a mother and baby, for themselves.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Athol Fugard's The Train Driver in the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through March 15. The production and MCT partners with The Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied for Hope , so please visit www. micahempowers.org. For further information, special programming, and tickets, please call the box office, 414. 291.7800 or www.milwaukeechambertheatre.com

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