Except for that angry exchange over the pointed finger, the 90-minute “Groundswell,’’ now receiving its New England premiere at Lyric Stage Company, gets off to a sluggish start that may have audience members glancing at their watches.
However, the pace soon quickens and the tensions rise when a retired white businessman named Smith (Richard McElvain) arrives at the small hotel on South Africa’s west coast where Thami is employed as a caretaker and gardener and Johan sometimes works as a handyman.
Johan (Timothy John Smith) and Thami (Jason Bowen) immediately hatch a scheme: They will talk the affluent Smith into investing in their plan to buy part of an abandoned diamond mine that is being auctioned off by the South African government. Thami has a kind and gentle nature, but the thuggish Johan, as it turns out, is willing to do more than just talk, especially when he has a few drinks in him.
Thami desperately wants the diamond concession so he can escape from near-poverty and make enough money to improve circumstances for his family (his wife and children languish in a shack in a distant city). Johan’s motives seem to be a murky blend of greed and a desire to write a new chapter in what has been a troubled life story.
In any case, he makes it clear to Thami that, if need be, they will play upon Smith’s presumed sense of white guilt by telling him the details of Thami’s separation from his family and of the tragic disappearance of Thami’s father during the apartheid era. There is a whiff here of Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker,’’ with its two-against-one dynamic, and also of the hard-sell, predator-circling-prey atmosphere of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.’’
