The Island

by Athol Fugard

Powerhouse Theatre - August 25, 2006

Live Review by Adam McKibbin

The Island represents political theatre at its near-best.  Set against the backdrop of South African apartheid in the ‘70s, the play connects a thread from the struggles of Ancient Greece to the modern day, and offers a bruising history lesson the unacquainted...and, for all of this, is really a story about two individuals.  They are political prisoners and pieces of a bigger history but, as the play routinely reminds the audience, they are also simply men—men with lives on the outside, men who drink and fuck, and who sometimes wonder whether the greater fight is worth the sacrifice of those daily freedoms.

The Island was developed through a workshop process by playwright Athol Fugard and actors Winston Ntshona and John Kani—who would also star in the production and eventually win Tonys for their work.  It’s a true actor’s piece, and, in this straightforward and powerful reincarnation by the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, Dorian Logan and Lovensky Jean-Baptiste seem grateful for the meat.

Their story begins with monotony.  John (Logan) and Winston (Jean-Baptiste) lug bricks from stack to stack, a Sisyphean chore meant to break the will of the prisoners being held on the island.  The island is Robben Island, which once served as a leper colony before being converted to a hardscrabble home for political prisoners of the oppressive South African regime; Nelson Mandela was a prisoner there, as was Pan African Congress President Robert Sobukwe.

Upon their return to their cramped cell, the relationship between John and Winston unfolds, resembling something like an old married couple.  John is fired up for the rare break in their routine, a chance to perform Sophocles’ Antigone.  But Winston—given a glowering, live-wire intensity by Jean-Baptiste—isn’t so sure, especially when he thinks about the repercussions of wearing a mop wig and toilet paper breasts in front of his fellow inmates.

Logan uses his boyish charm to full effect—occasionally overplaying it—as John keeps pushing and pestering his cellmate.  In between Antigone preparations, they pass the time by telling stories to each other and staging mock phone calls to their friends out in the world; their friends and wives are presumably getting on just fine with their lives.  As befitting a play that was perfected throughout workshops, Logan and Jean-Baptiste have spent time workshopping their own performance, and their resulting, time-tested chemistry is palpable.  Given its stark staging requirements, The Island is a play that doesn’t demand much technically, which increases the pressure on the script and the actors.  The script is pretty much bulletproof—there are some exquisitely written scenes, and the runtime is brisk—and Logan and Jean-Baptiste rise up to meet the challenge.  Their finest scene together comes after the delivery of some unexpected news that threatens to separate them, when Jean-Baptiste convincingly lets down the guard of the mercurial Winston as he finally gives voice to the question that’s surely been plaguing him for years:  why him?

There are, of course, no easy answers for that, and The Island doesn’t reach for any.  There are also no happy endings; while apartheid was quashed, there is still a deep economic divide in South Africa that tends to fall along racial lines (a problem that is obviously not confined to that country).

This review, however, does have a happy ending—hopefully.  If The Island is indicative of the work that the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble will continue to pursue (they were founded in 2004), then Angeleno theatergoers will be better off because of them.