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| Peter Rogan, Leonard Frey, Estelle Parsons. |
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| Leonard Frey, Estelle Parsons. |
This play is the least successful of distinguished South African dramatist Athol Fugard’s
works produced in America. It is also the only one that—at the time—didn’t
specifically confront his nation’s racial problems. People Are Living There looked instead at the dreary lives of a small group
of emotionally scarred characters living in a shabby Johannesburg boarding house
run by the slovenly Milly (Estelle Parsons).
This unhappy woman, whose boarder-boyfriend of 10 years has
just gone out with another woman, is surrounded by a pair of male boarders and
the wife of one of them. Don (Leonard Frey) is a pessimistic, cynical young man
who questions life’s meaning. Shorty (Peter Rogan) is a thick-witted postman
married to the attractive but irritatingly obtuse Sissy (Diana Davila). The
main part of the play concerns a 50th birthday party thrown by the
group for Milly to cheer themselves up. Their bitterness soon gets the better
of them and they fall to sniping at one another and especially at the hapless
Shorty, who bears the brunt of everyone’s disgust.
Several critics took umbrage at what they deemed an action-less
and largely uninvolving drama with a sardonic message about life’s vacuous
purposes. Clive Barnes observed: “The writing is oddly grating. In Mr. Fugard's
earlier plays his characters had their own reality and created their own speech
patterns. But this seedy Johannesburg locale is too near to our own experience
for us to accept the easy stylization of language that seemed acceptable in the
earlier plays. And here Mr. Fugard's people just do not talk like people.”
Other complaints were leveled at the writing’s repetitiousness,
lack of incident, overly literary style, and what Harold Clurman called the “clash
between the play’s ideas—the dismaying absurdity of life—and the by now equally
familiar naturalistic drawing of still another ‘lower depths’.” Nonetheless,
Douglas Watt used the words “humorous, compassionate and forceful” to describe
the work, while Jack Kroll pointed to its “power, scarifying humor and dramatic
effectiveness.”
The consensus held that Estelle Parsons gave a sweepingly
emotional performance in a production whose fine acting was its principal
achievement. Barnes noted: “I much admired the flat‐voiced, flattened Cockney
of Estelle Parsons as Milly the birthday girl on the fringe of disaster, the
fiercely neurotic Leonard Frey, the more subdued Peter Rogan, and the dim‐mouthed
Diana Davila. It is a good cast. But the play is missing. Possibly South Africa
itself is as empty.”
