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Monique Carboni ©2025  Larry Bryggman, David Lansbury, Souleymane Sy Savane

There is very little reconciliation but many truths in Ian Bruce’s riveting “Groundswell,” presented by The New Group, and expertly directed by Scott Elliot. Set on the outskirts of post-apartheid South Africa in an isolated inn, it is ostensibly about a government concession scheme for diamond mines (giving the wealth of the nation back to the people) and two poor men, one black, one white, who try to persuade a third, a wealthy, retired Afrikaner, to invest.

Thami (the superb Souleymane Sy Savane) is the gardener who becomes the manager of the inn when his employers go away for the winter. As the play opens, he writes a letter to his wife in Capetown, telling her he goes to the river every day, looking for diamonds. He is lying, to give her hope that one day he will get her out of the poverty that she and her two children live in; he lies to buy the time he needs in order to “become a man.” Johan (David Lansbury, a dangerous and electrifying actor) enters, who is a friend of Thami, and quite the loose canon. A former policeman convicted of brutality, he spent almost three years in prison; he is a jailbird, with no real prospects ahead of him, apart from the diving he does in the sea for diamonds. However, he has seen the fancy Mitsubishi in the parking lot and scavenged through the car; he knows the guest staying at the inn, Smith (Larry Bryggman, appropriately upright, unaware and then defensive) has the means to invest in a diamond scheme that will eventually make himself and Thami rich. The plan is to wine and dine Smith, using gentle persuasion, and then, if that doesn’t work, a well-placed guilt trip. Johan has agreed not to drink, nor tell vulgar stories of pissing into his wet suit. Dinner is served, Johan begins drinking, and when Smith refuses to invest one hundred thousand rand, everything goes to hell.

Monique Carboni ©2025  David Lansbury, Souleymane Sy Savane

This hell is where the whole play comes alive, and the deeper issues surface. Johan, who needs validation of his hopeless life, wants it from Smith; he feels he is owed. What he does is not just for his black friend. Someone is going to pay, and it is going to be Smith, with his money or his life. Thami, passive through most of the terrorizing of Smith, also seems to feel he is owed something, because he is poor and Smith is rich. But Smith has lost too, and describes as much in a terrific monologue illustrating what price he has had to pay for being a “moral man”; namely, his wife, his job, and his children who were forced to go abroad because being white in South Africa suddenly became a liability.

But Smith has more that Thami, whose family lives in a tin shack, which he describes as an oven in summer and a fridge in winter. Thami’s need is great, and is expertly exploited by Johan, who sneers, “Do you want to end up like your father, lost in the wilderness“” Once murder is introduced, however, Thami balks. Will the reckoning come at too high a price?

In any given play, when a knife is introduced and put in a drawer, a seasoned audience member knows that the knife will resurface eventually. Between the introducing and the resurfacing, the smart playwright distracts the audience so the knife is forgotten, and Ian Bruce is very, very smart. There are no easy answers, nor should there be. “Groundswell” is a tense, intermission-free ride, and the three actors, Savane, Lansbury, and Bryggman could not be better. Broadway is not the only place to see virtuosity.