harold3 This may appear a bit harsh, but I think it’s inexcusable that Long Beach Playhouse is running Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys under the title Master Harold & the Boys. Even were the differences in the title insignificant, it’s a bit of an insult to the playwright to alter his title; but as it is, the quotation marks around “Master Harold” are quite significant.

The ellipsis, too, is no mere trifle. “The boys,” you see, are a pair of South African blacks working in a café owned by the family of young Master Harold—or Hally, as he is called by Sam, the more senior of “the boys,” who has taken a very real hand in raising the now-high-school-aged lad—and as such, they are an afterthought, servants, not worthy of true inclusion.

They are, though the heart of the play, which opens with Willie (Gary DeWitt Marshall) dancing with himself in preparation for the 1950 East Province Ballroom Championships. But that heart takes a while to start beating. Not much happens during the first hour, other than Sam (Rovin Jay) by turns teasing and instructing Willie about the most efficacious way for Willie and his partner to both get along and put in a good showing during the competition.

Somewhere in here, Hally (Paul Breazeale) comes in from the rain and begins his homework, which devolves into a conversation between himself and Sam touching upon academic subjects. Like the Willie/Sam dance talk, this is probably twice as long as it needs to be, Fugard continuing his hour-long string of uneconomic writing coupled with sometimes poor dialog.

The play picks up once Fugard finally gets around to the central metaphor: the dance competition as the effort to make life right. “It’s like living in a dream in which accidents never happen,” says one of the “boys” of the ballroom final. But in life “nobody knows the steps, and there is no music.”

The action pivots on Hally’s bitterness toward his father, which manifests in Hally’s backsliding into the racism that of course has been his milieu. “You think you’re safe inside that fair skin of yours,” warns Sam, “[but i]f you’re not careful, you’re going to [isolate] yourself for a long time to come.”

It ain’t subtle, nor especially deep. Fugard gets a bit of a pass on this count, though, considering that the play debuted in 1982, still almost a decade before South Africa’s apartheid system came crashing down. Way back then, the themes in play needed to be broadcast as plainly and widely as possible.

This doesn’t answer the question of why Long Beach Playhouse chose to stage “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys in 2011, with Nelson Mandela’s presidency more than a decade in our rearview mirror. But they have, and they steer this quaint little ship ably enough. To their credit, Marshall, Jay, and Breazeale are fully committed to the dialog, even when its clunkiness is painful (Says Hally during a phone call to his mother on the subject of his father’s medical condition, “If anything, it sounds like a bad turn to me, which I sincerely hope it isn’t.” Ugh.). It may be fair, though, to ask whether the casting of Breazeale is ideal. It’s not his talent that’s the problem: it’s his age. Fugard labels Hally as 17 but writes him at closer to 15, and Breazeale appears to be around 30. But suspension of disbelief is a watchword of theatre, so….

“Master Harold” . . . and the Boys takes place in one unchanging room, so it better be a good one. And set designer Timothy Thorn deserves his propers, having created a cutaway interior that allows us to stay in the intended milieu without our suspending anything.

Long Beach Playhouse’s staging of “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys is earnest. No doubt that earnestness overthrew South Africa’s apartheid system. But I’m not sure it’s enough to help the play transcend its historical and artistic confines.

“MASTER HAROLD” . . . AND THE BOYS LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE • 5021 E ANAHEIM ST • LONG BEACH 90804 • 562.494.1014 LBPLAYHOUSE.ORG • THURS-SAT 8PM, SUN 2PM • $24; $21 FOR SENIORS; $14 FOR STUDENTS • THROUGH JULY 30