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Seller's Description:
New York. 1982. August 1982. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394528743. 60 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robert Anthony. keywords: Drama Literature South Africa. FROM THE PUBLISHER-From the author of the highly acclaimed A Lesson from Aloes (winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as Best Play of 1980)-a powerful new play that delves into the very impulse and core of racism. ‘Master Harold' is Hally, a precocious white South African teenager, and ‘the boys' are Willie and Sam, two black men who work for his family, both of them old enough to be his father. It is 1950 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and as the play opens, Hally, back from school, stops in at the family-owned tearoom, where Willie and Sam are cleaning up-and practicing their ballroom dancing. Hally falls into conversation with the two men with whom he enjoys an immediate camaraderie, familiarity, and affection. And they share common memories-Willie and Sam have been Hally's life-long second family. He also shares his learning with them, as they share the stuff of their daily lives with him. The mood is easy and calm, until Hally learns that his crippled, alcoholic father is about to be released from the hospital and will be home again, where his presence is painfully disruptive. Despite Hally's desperate admonitions, his mother is either too weak or too frightened (or both) to try to prevent his release, and-suddenly angry and frustrated and afraid-Hally turns viciously on Willie and Sam, lashing out at them as he's never done before. In the play's horrifying climax, each character's anguish is illuminated in a blaze of emotional devastation, and we are made to understand how the underlying realities of place and time can come to dominate what we do and who we are. ‘Master Harold'. and the boys was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven in March 1982, and opened on Broadway in May of the same year. Both productions were greeted with unanimous praise (‘Mr. Fugard's drama-lyrical in design, shattering in impact-is likely to be an enduring part of the theater long. after most of this Broadway season has turned to dust, ' wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times). inventory #4010.