Home Is Where the Art Is

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Just before he flew to the U.S. to direct a splendid revival at Princeton this month of his favorite early play, Hello and Goodbye, dramatist Athol Fugard asked friends at a dinner party, "Am I about to become the new South Africa's first literary redundancy?" Although he tells the story with a twinkle, that fear has hovered over him for years. In his mind he is a poetic playwright, but the world has seen him as a political, even polemic one, and his works are valued more as testimony against apartheid than for their subtle interplay of emotion and Beckettian sensitivity to the downtrodden. For many people, Fugard's dramas mattered less than the taboos they broke -- The Blood Knot put a black actor alongside a white one on the same Johannesburg stage -- and the punishments they brought, including revocation of his passport and virtual house arrest from 1967 to 1971. Those experiences ensured a niche in history but also made his storytelling seem limited to a place and time. His plays were often treated as a field correspondent's dispatches.

Fugard first felt his relevance eroding when black anger overwhelmed white liberal gradualism in the '80s. Then, as the intransigent white government relented and prospects for peace improved, critics -- notably in New York City -- seemed to lose interest in a man they once hailed as great. Fugard's most recent pieces, My Children! My Africa! and Playland, dealt with South Africa's smoldering race hatred via small-scale, personal tragedies. Each had success elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world but closed quickly off-Broadway. Even at home in South Africa, where the shows were lauded, people wonder what a white liberal dissenter has to say to a society embarking on black-majority rule.

The answer, Fugard hopes, is plenty: "I'm beginning to realize that the challenges I face daily as an ordinary white South African can bring enormous new energy to my work." With Hello and Goodbye having ended its run on Sunday, Fugard is heading back to South Africa, where he does all his writing. In a departure from the rituals of a lifetime, he will begin two plays at once -- one a look at the relationship between young and old "that will be an evident metaphor for what is happening in my country," the other an outright collaboration with five high school students.

Through auditions he selected two black youths, a white, one of Indian descent and one of mixed race (or, in South African parlance, colored). After school and on weekends, he will meet with them to develop a text based on their experiences and hopes, to be performed in June and July in schools and at a festival in his hometown of Port Elizabeth, then on a professional stage in Johannesburg.

This talking-it-out technique has been the wellspring of South Africa's liveliest theatrical movement of recent years, the roughhewn, hortatory "township plays" created largely by young black amateurs, including the international hits Sarafina! and Asinamali! But it is quite a departure for Fugard, normally a believer in elite craftsmanship despite the egalitarian sentiments of his work. He has collaborated only once before, developing Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island with professional black actors Winston Ntshona and John Kani, who jointly won a 1975 Tony Award for their performances in the two shows.

"I don't know if this enterprise will work," Fugard says. "But I share with these young people the belief that for all the bombast from politicians, no one is speaking to or for their generation. And of course there is a selfish reason: a white person in the new South Africa must expect to be on the sidelines. This allows me to be part of the debate."

If this project is vital to Fugard politically, the more important one emotionally will be the play about youth and age. While preparing to write, a process of meditation that never takes him less than two years and sometimes lasts 20, he delighted in Princeton's invitation to revisit Hello and Goodbye, which dates to 1965. Its sometimes absurdist portrait of a dysfunctional family centers on an unseen father much like Fugard's own -- alcoholic, crippled and mean. The playwright's favorite role as an actor has long been the cowed, despondent son, who represents a path not taken -- the misery Fugard might have succumbed to if he had lacked drive and brains. Although the character is 27, Fugard intended to play him again at Princeton until he found he could get Zeljko Ivanek, who played the title role in "Master Harold" . . . and the Boys in its debut at Yale. Ivanek, at 36 the most gifted American stage actor of his generation, gave what Fugard enviously calls "the definitive performance -- where I was still, he was dangerous."

During rehearsals, Fugard adds, "I realized something new. Although nothing in the play is overtly political, that family is not just mine but a metaphor for South Africa -- the decaying patriarchy, the despairing youth, the woman rooted in carnality and common sense with a huge, heroic heart. It reminded me that I am a regional writer. My plays are more than politics. But they are never removed from my homeland. My two subjects, myself and my country, are one."