Provocative, intimate "Exits and Entrances" ideal for APT's Touchstone stage

August 11, 2010

6:06 PM

American Players Theatre

David Daniel, left, as the young playwright Athol Fugard and Kenneth Albers as the aging actor André Huguenet.

While the myth of the solitary genius has a strong hold in the popular imagination, for most creative people, there are mentors, role models, sparks of inspiration.

For the acclaimed South African playwright, novelist, actor and director Athol Fugard, befriending actor André Huguenet was a profound spark. When the two met in a Capetown production of Oedipus Rex in 1956, Huguenet was fifty, Fugard in his twenties.

Though they differed in many ways -- including their views on the purpose of theater -- their connection was marked by compassion and mutual respect.

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As directed by Kate Buckley, Exits and Entrances is intimate, affecting, and another excellent example of the sort of fare that is well-suited to the 200-seat, indoor Touchstone Theatre.As we see these men in two encounters several years apart, we can't help but feel the weight and turbulence of history outside the world of the theater, yet those themes are handled deftly through the lens of a single human relationship.

As the older man, Kenneth Albers is masterful at conveying Huguenet's sense of the theater as literally a matter of life and death.For him, growing up gay in a highly religious family, the theater gave him an outlet to explore other lives.(As he tells the younger man early on, "To be who and what I am feels very much like a curse at times.") To him, the works of Greek tragedians and Shakespeare probe essential, inescapable questions.

APT core company member David Daniel, as the young playwright, shows the genesis of a mature writer who gains conviction in his own ideas even as he regards Huguenet as a sort of second father.

Exits and Entrances is a provocative, at times searing exploration of the very reasons for theater:Why act? Why write?If last year's APT hit, James DeVita's one-man show In Acting Shakespeare, examined the motivations for a life in theater from an appealingly comedic standpoint, Exits and Entrances is theater about theater when the stakes are ratcheted much higher, for both the two men involved and a nation at large.