Reviews

Have You Seen Us?

Sam Waterston stars in Athol Fugard’s sketchy new play about racial prejudice in America.

Sam Waterston and Liza Colón-Zayas
in Have You Seen Us?
(© T Charles Erickson)
Sam Waterston and Liza Colón-Zayas
in Have You Seen Us?
(© T Charles Erickson)

When the great South African playwright Athol Fugard turns his focus to class and racial prejudice in America, trumpets should sound. However, what emerges from Have You Seen Us?, now premiering at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven under Gordon Edelstein’s direction, is a thin, staticky mewl, like that of a faraway radio station playing a vaguely familiar, once-popular tune.

The show’s focus is on Classics professor Henry Parsons (Sam Waterston, gamely affecting a South African accent but failing to achieve a native’s ease), a cantankerous, mostly dry drunk who gets his jollies insulting Adela (Liza Colon-Zayas, who’s given little to do beyond appearing stalwart), the Mexican waitress at the mall diner where he habitually lunches.

As he reconstructs their encounters — the play is framed as a flashback — it’s clear that their pastime of “trading insults and offensive jibes” really was quite cruel, not to mention one-sided, and not an instance of harmless ribbing among familiars. Indeed, characters rarely come as more unlikable than Henry, and Adele’s assessment of him as a borracho perdido (or hopeless alcoholic) appears not so much vindictive as realistic. Still, the set-up portends an eventual meeting of minds between these two deracinated, lonely exiles. And indeed, there will be a bit of that after Henry bullies Adela into singing her favorite song and, on no apparent basis, lavishes her with hifalutin, backhanded praise.

Into this simplistic exchange, Fugard introduces another set of lost souls: Solly and Rachel (Sol Frieder and Elaine Kussack, both underused here), a pair of ancient, displaced European Jews. Fugard has seemingly planted them in this playlet to tug at our heartstrings, and they might do so if their dialogue didn’t display a bit of a tin ear on Fugard’s part. (“She wants we must eat chili!,” Solly complains to his wife about the luncheonette’s limited menu choices.)

As it happens, Henry had encountered the couple before, when he mis-wished them a “Merry Christmas,” only to be gently corrected. Now, seemingly out of the blue, he experiences a paroxysm of guilt. Henry’s core problem, as he confesses to the ever-patient Adela, is that he’s a born-and-bred anti-Semite. There will be a tidy, redemptive — if improbably melodramatic — denouement (which Frieder finesses beautifully).

During this season of pervasive good will, it feels a bit unseemly to fault Fugard, who has given us some truly extraordinary, soul-stretching works, for presenting a substandard effort. But the sketchy study that is Have You Seen Us? just doesn’t seem ready to see the light of the stage.