Production a tasty theatrical appetizer

South Africa’s Athol Fugard is one of the world’s great playwrights – and great men of conscience – yet you need not think of his 2004 play “Exits and Entrances” as a mighty tome.

It’s a quiet, gentle memoir, the theatrical equivalent of a brief thoughtful essay on the subject, “A Tribute to a Mentor.” That mentor is the South African actor Andre Huguenet. This play consists almost entirely of dressing room conversations between a character named Playwright (clearly Fugard) and Huguenet.

This Interplayers production, directed by Karen Kalensky, captures Fugard’s elegy to this grand, old-school actor with intelligence and sensitivity. While the breadth of the subject matter is somewhat narrow – it is a piece of theater about theater – this production is never less than thought-provoking.

These dressing room conversations sometimes range into wider themes – the injustice of South African apartheid, the price paid for idealism and the emotional pain that comes with being a “Dopper moffie” – Dopper being slang for a member of the strict Dutch Reformed Church and moffie being slang for homosexual. (It pays to study the glossary of slang in the program before curtain time.)

Yet most of the time the conversation returns to art in general and theater in particular. For instance, the Playwright and the actor have a verbal battle over what a play should strive to be. The young Playwright wants to show the world the squalor and injustice of apartheid (which Fugard later became famous for doing) while the aging actor finds that a useless waste of time. Nobility, grandeur, profound inspiration – that’s what art should strive for.

There’s also a large helping of self-pity in Huguenet’s conversation. He spent his entire life delivering nobility, grandeur and inspiration to the masses – and what was his reward? Dwindling audiences and poverty. At one point, he sarcastically urges the Playwright to turn his pen to “drawing room farces.” That’s the only way to make a buck in this game.

This verges on inside-baseball sometimes, but Damon Abdallah as the Playwright and Maynard Villers as Huguenet both give such nuanced, thoughtful and skilled performances that the themes often seem universal. What applies to art also applies to life.

Abdallah truly embodies the Playwright, with the furrowed brow of a young man who wants to be idealistic and successful at the same time, and whose thoughtfulness easily crosses the line into brooding. Abdallah also has a credible South African accent, without overdoing it.

Villers has the powerful, modulated voice required for this aging Shakespearean and loads of stage presence. He also (with credit to Kalensky) successfully walks the fine line between the actor’s brash confidence and his crippling insecurity.

Villers is also required to deliver large swaths of the “great play” canon – scenes from Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from “Hamlet,” to name just two. Villers does so in a way that makes us understand why the Playwright so deeply admires the old actor. Yet these scenes also are the ones where it becomes obvious that “Exits and Entrances” is not Fugard at his best. It’s as if he’s calling in reinforcements to breathe drama into his own play. One scene in particular, in which Huguenet portrays a tormented churchman, seems like padding.

These scenes also emphasize what is conspicuously lacking from the rest of the script – real dramatic tension. Yes, the Playwright and the actor argue sometimes, yet we always can tell that, as memoirs go, this one is wholly affectionate. The play feels more like a theater-class appetizer than a full theatrical meal.

So despite all of this show’s fine qualities, it may prove a tough sell to audiences. All I can say is that it certainly has more meat than any “drawing room farce.”