Act 1 comes from a playwright who is indulgent with himself and his characters, giving them one insufferably talky, hour-long scene in which nothing happens. Why are we being invited to see this play? Who knows. Wake me when it's over.

Act 2 comes from a playwright who, without all that much reference to Act 1, easily sets up dramatic tension, quickly details his characters, and brings this hour to a beautifully crafted, elegant theatrical closure.

The first playwright is the estimable Athol Fugard. The second playwright is the estimable Athol Fugard. How is it possible that the great South African writer, who has brilliantly transferred his nation's unique yin and yang to the stage over many decades, could be both so tedious and so galvanizing?

Surely the problem's not the subject of the play, Coming Home, which is ripe for the sort of drama that Fugard finally unleashes after intermission. Coming Home is a follow-up to his 1995 Valley Song, an early post-apartheid work that dealt with South Africa's great expectations by following a young black girl, Veronica, who leaves her grandfather's farm in a small village to follow her dream of becoming a singer in Cape Town.

Now, in Coming Home, she returns. She has pulled herself and her preschool-age son from squalor and hopelessness in Cape Town, where her life has devolved, and finds a way to travel back to a new life in the now-empty, shabby one-room home of her childhood.

"I promise I will try to make it right for you," she tells her little boy, who is quietly disappointed by the actuality of a place that's become magical in his mind, through her stories.

The most I can say about Act 1 is that the two of them get there. That's how Coming Home opens, and aside from a string of memory orations - which give us an instant sense of the village and of family tradition but continue like a tape on a loop - that's how it ends.

By Act 2, even Veronica (the wholly convincing Patrice Johnson) is rebelling against the recitations of memories. When her only friend, the simple-minded Alfred (a portrayal nailed by Nyambi Nyambi, and enhanced by the way he uses his large, sculpted hands) reminds her of her girlish picnic days on the farm, she unleashes her fury: The way things were cannot relate to the way things are, she tells him - and the plot begins.

From that point, the play sweeps you in, as does the fluid staging by Blanka Zizka, the Wilma's co-artistic director, who makes sure the sudden dramatic arc retains its tense symmetry. Fugard's second half is a metaphor for a South Africa whose promise remains unfulfilled; it covers the health crisis by a government that refused to acknowledge AIDS as a medical problem.

The play's wise grandfather (the fine Lou Ferguson) is still, in death, the moving force in Veronica's life. The two boys, Antonio J. Dandridge (age 9) and Elijah Felder (age 5), round out the excellent cast in a play - this is only its third production - that is, unfortunately, two plays.

Coming Home

Through Nov. 15 at Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St. Tickets: $36-$55. Information: 215-546-7824 or www.wilmatheater.org.