Theater review: The Train Driver

South African playwright Athol Fugard has been well represented on area stages from the Wilma to People’s Light & Theatre Company, but nowhere more than by the Lantern Theater Company with “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys (2006), Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (2009) and The Island (2011). Now, Lantern’s area premiere of Fugard’s 2010 drama The Train Driver showcases a lesser Fugard play with a superlative production. 

Pete DeLaurier — who directed Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island for Lantern — plays the title character, Roelf Visagie, a white man who was helming a train that killed a suicidal black woman and her baby. He’s come to a shabby graveyard in a destitute black neighborhood — created in dirty, shabby detail by scenic designer Lance Kniskern — to find her burial site and swear at her. 

“Why did she have to drag someone else, me, into her shit?” he laments. The incident causes nightmares that tear him apart. “All I know,” he agonizes, “is she is dead, and I am well and truly fucked.” 

DeLaurier, a veteran People’s Light & Theatre Company resident actor and one of area theater’s underappreciated treasures, gives a brilliantly raw performance that alone makes The Train Driver compelling and worthwhile. His emotional honesty, as he physically collapses while also mentally imploding, is truly harrowing and heartbreaking — and he does it all with a thick, yet always understandable, Afrikaans accent. 

Fugard, winner of the 2011 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, doesn’t give the cemetery’s sole worker, Simon Hanabe, played by Kirk Wendell Brown, nearly so much to do. 

Simon listens to, and struggles to empathize with, this obsessed white man who has invaded Simon’s harsh world to find the remains of the unidentified woman and baby. He explains that there are rocks and metallic junk on the graves, instead of flowers, to prevent wild dogs from digging up and eating the bodies. 

Brown gives Simon dignity, though the meanness of his life — shoveling sandy graves for unknown blacks who have met violent or mysterious ends, and protecting them from marauding canines and himself from knife-wielding gangs — feels vividly real. 

This isn’t a buddy story, however; Visagie’s spiritual torment requires salvation that transcends friendship. 

Simon introduces and concludes the play, announcing the revelations that complete the story, and provides a quiet, weary, yet noble guide for the driver’s dark journey into impoverished post-apartheid black South African life, which has not changed much despite Nelson Mandela’s political victories. 

This is familiar Fugard territory: Whites are shocked and dismayed by conditions which, though surrounded by and benefiting from them, they hadn’t noticed before. 

Busy director Matt Pfeiffer, whose fine InterAct production Down Past Passyunk opened just a week before The Train Driver, frames these strong performances with Katherine Fritz’s suitably grim and grimy costumes, Drew Billiau’s atmospheric lighting and Christopher Colucci’s bleak desert soundscape and African percussion-powered transition music. 

Fugard doesn’t break new ground with The Train Driver, but his important themes certainly merit this intense 90-minute airing, especially through such a lovingly detailed and sincerely acted production. 

Through May 4, $30-$38, Lantern Theater Company at St. Stephen’s Theater, 923 Ludlow St., 215-829-0395, lanterntheater.org.