It’s been a good year for the South African playwright Athol Fugard, what with the Broadway revival of “The Road to Mecca” and the Signature company dedicating a whole season to his work.
Too bad this love fest concludes with the ponderous, snoozy “The Train Driver,” a New York premiere that Fugard directed as well.
It starts off well enough as we discover Christopher H. Barreca’s fantastic set: a sprawling burial ground that looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape of dirt and rocks, rubbish and the bombed-out wreck of a car.
There aren’t even any crosses — the keeper, a black man named Simon Hanabe (Leon Addison Brown), explains that they get stolen to make firewood. Instead, he uses hubcaps and other junk to mark the anonymous graves.
This isn’t helping Roelf Visagie (Ritchie Coster), a bedraggled Afrikaner who comes in looking for the body of a woman he “pulverized” a few months before, when she threw herself under the train he was driving, along with her baby.
The entire 90-minute show consists of Roelf trying to exorcise that trauma while Simon listens and thoughtfully eats from a can. The two men share the stage but not much else — Fugard never establishes any meaningful or dramatic connection between them.
This is the kind of show that obviously guns for importance. You can tell it wants to say something big and deep about the desperate mess South Africa is in, but the metaphor isn’t grounded.
Fugard has said the play is about guilt, yet Roelf is tortured by deaths he couldn’t have prevented. This is an odd choice — after all, South Africa is full of people who should face responsibility for crimes they did commit — and it prevents us from caring about the outcome.