Stagings offer artistic ardor, great rewards

Could Scudera have done a bit more with the room's lighting, employing more darkness, or a lantern, or something that would aid Zak in re-creating his character's late-night observations? Sure. Still, suffice it to say that though we are all very familiar with the story, my entire family jumped out of our chairs at the proper moment. Mission accomplished: simple and well-told. - Wendy Rosenfield

Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. In the bad old days of South Africa's apartheid, this Athol Fugard play was strong and brave, a denunciation of all the laws that would prohibit interracial theater, not to mention interracial love affairs. But this is here and now; we are not in South Africa, nor is a black/white love affair a crime, nor are we shocked by interracial couples. And we're no longer shocked by nudity onstage.

So why revive a play about a white librarian and a black school principal whose romance begins when he comes to borrow books he has no legal access to? One obvious relevance to the here and now is that Statements is not only about race issues, but also about the ways government intrudes into private life as the police assume entitlement to surveillance, suspicion, and arrest.

But the director, Janet Bressler, seems to understand nothing of this, nor does she seem to know anything about Fugard, South Africa's most famous playwright, other than that he wrote a novel (Tsotsi) that became a second-rate movie.

Of the three actors onstage, only one can act; Brandon Sloan gives a creditable performance, shifting from intellectual pride to obsequious fear. Ruchama Bilenky as the librarian delivers her lines as though she's reading them; no vocal emotion, no facial gestures, no nothing. The detective who arrests them, who should be really loathsome and frightening, smirks and pronounces library "liberry."

A theatrical embarrassment and a waste of both Fugard's play and your Fringe time. - Toby Zinman