THE RESIDUALS OF APARTHEID : A PLAYWRIGHT’S PAINFUL INVESTMENT : PAINFUL INVESTMENT IN RESIDUALS OF APARTHEID

What does South Africa do to a white child? To a white adult? To a black adult?

“I wouldn’t presume to speak for the black man--and I don’t,” noted playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who lived with his family in South Africa from age 10 to 16. Now 25, the locally born writer has tried to sort out his feelings about that period in his life in “The Film Society,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through Feb. 22.

Seated in one of the center’s offices last week, Baitz, a product of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, stressed that “the residual horror from that type of experience is enormous. I came back from that country with a kind of hysterical desire to assimilate into the great, democratic-American process. I really needed to be American again. Flying back, I was thinking about baseball, pizza--all the cliches. But there was also so much (emotional) baggage. It was something that was always inside me, that I didn’t talk about at all.”

Instead, Baitz went to work in Hollywood and wrote a play “Mizlansky/Zilinsky” (which won him a 1985 L.A. Weekly award) about show-business agents. “Then one day I was walking around a bookstore and I found this book, ‘How to Start Your Own Film Society.’ I’d also just seen a great Ted Koppel report from South Africa, and it brought back those old memories: the uncertainty, the guilt, trying to reach out to another race--and not knowing how.”

The resulting play, set in 1970 South Africa, tells of the rise to power of 45-year-old Afrikaner schoolteacher Jonathon Balton.

When we meet Balton, he is shrugging off the political turmoil around him, almost stubbornly immersed in the film society he’s established at the prep school. Said Baitz: “The film society is an escape for him into a very gentle and specific reality: of old Hollywood colors, films like ‘Touch of Mink’ and ‘Pillow Talk.’ In the course of the story, he goes from an extreme denial of what seems to him to be the horrid reality of the world, to an acknowledgement of it--and its direct relationship to him.”

While no blacks are actually seen in the work, “their presence permeates the life of the play,” Baitz said. “The play is dictated to--quietly--by a pre-revolutionary society, a kind of Chekhovian malaise--the malaise of ease. We see people (like Jonathon and his British-born mother) living within their own reality, but what happens is that their own reality is inexorably connected to the larger political reality--and their actions are intertwined, dependent on living in a racially restricted society.”

The playwright (who’s currently developing another perspective on his early travels, “Dutch Landscape,” for the Mark Taper Forum, as well as an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” for LATC) shook his head.

“It’s very hard for me to make sense of the time we lived in South Africa, because I felt so guilty about it--guilt that I lived there and acclimatized myself. Just the fact of having black servants. And I don’t think I treated them particularly well. You begin to take their presence for granted. My father (an employee of Carnation) went in with a well-intentioned American, liberal-Jewish tradition behind him, and one of the first things he did was desegregate the factory. But you cannot get away from the race problem, or the (imbalance of) great poverty and wealth.”

And there was violence: a maid who rebeled one night and drunkenly attacked the Baitz home.

“After they’d carried her away--the black policemen (who arrived first) had broken her jaw, almost killed her; there was blood all over the grass--the Afrikaner cop arrived,” Baitz recalled grimly. “It was such a triumph for him. ‘Best get yourself a gun,’ he said. The attitude was ‘Oh, you Americans with your poses and stances--you’re the moral police of the world. But the reality is, a capper (black) is a capper.’

“I felt outraged hearing that--because the transformation had been so complete. We’d evolved into that world of paranoia and discrimination, compartmentalization.”

As for his middle-aged protagonist, Baitz joked that the character is a worst-case scenario of himself. “I do think of myself as being older. I feel kind of weather-beaten. I try to spend my days thinking about this stuff and it wears you down.

“This play is about a lack of honor; at the same time, I’m trying to find honor in myself by writing it. I’m trying build upon my own reality, find out how I relate to the rest of the world. As artists, I feel that we have to reveal ourselves. Anything that’s going to matter is going to involve tearing yourself apart. I identify enormously with (such personal expressions as) Athol Fugard’s ‘Master Harold . . . and the Boys’ and Philip Roth’s ‘The Zuckerman Trilogy.’

“You know, there’s not a lot of joy in the world,” Baitz reminded. “And I think that as Americans we tend to laugh too much: We don’t want to deal with it. Well, I want to deal with it. I want to understand and I want to feel. But there’s no hopelessness in me--none. I just want to take it all seriously.”