Two men mechanically orbit around the stage in their bare feet. Sweating, panting, sometimes grunting, they wordlessly migrate, workmanlike, from start to finish, seeing to obviously appointed, labor-intensive yet meaningless tasks. Only the mimicked buzz of flies suggests the oppressive weather. Two tin cups, a bucket and otherwise-barren dais suggests the setting is a prison, though its whereabouts are never made clear. The year, too, is unknown, as are the two men's crimes and the length of their jail terms.

Thirty years after its debut, the apartheid-era drama The Island resonates all the more because of its deliberate lack of specificity. Conceived in 1973 by South African dramatist Athol Fugard in collaboration with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, there were of course some practical considerations behind such vagueness in the apartheid era. Fugard, Kani and Ntshona were all persecuted over the years by the South African government under apartheid (Kani and Ntshona were jailed, while Fugard, the lone white man among them, had had his passport revoked for a time). The Island, recognized by all as Robben Island (home to political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela) deliberately had no name. Deliberately, a play on an island without a name, about prisoners without a country, sentences without end and crimes unclear, hits its intended target in any country, in any place and any time.

Underscoring the endurance and relevance of its universal messages about justice and the abuse of power is Kristoff Skalet and Teddy Harrell’s reprisal of the play’s lone characters: cellmates, jailed together for indeterminate sentences, once strangers and now long-time friends. Like trapeze artists, they walk the tightrope and highwire with unrelenting trust in each other, never needing to check that the other is there.