La Jolla Playhouse Snares a Fugard Premiere : Theater: South African’s play to be the centerpiece of a season that almost wasn’t.

Perseverance paid off big for La Jolla Playhouse this year.

Des McAnuff, the playhouse’s artistic director, pursued Athol Fugard’s newest play, “My Children! My Africa!” with a tenacity that convinced the renowned South African playwright to direct its West Coast premiere at the Playhouse. It will be the centerpiece of the 1990 season, July 8-Aug. 12 at the Mandell Weiss Theatre.

“My Children! My Africa!” joins two world premieres by veteran Playhouse artists Geoff Hoyle and Keith Reddin and Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in the six-play season that extends from May 13-Nov. 18. The last two shows, which have yet to be announced, may be classical or new musicals or dramas, McAnuff said.

The season was assembled despite the threat that there would be no season. It was only two weeks ago that the playhouse announced that its fund-raisers had produced $60,000 over the $500,000 McAnuff said was needed by Dec. 31 to ensure the 1990 season. The theater still needs to raise an additional $440,000 by June 30 to achieve financial stability. “But I see a light shining now,” said McAnuff. “We’re still here and we’re talking about the season.”

The Fugard play, which closed in January at the 99-seat New York Theatre Workshop, was inspired by a tragic incident about a black South African teacher trying to work within the apartheid system. It marks a return to the overtly political subjects Fugard has slowly veered away from in his increasingly inward-looking works like “The Road to Mecca” and “A Place With the Pigs.”

Still, Fugard, who is white, said in a telephone interview that despite its theme, this play is, if anything, more personal than anything else he has written. That effect was heightened when he cast and directed his own daughter, Lisa Fugard, in the part of the white student who comes to look at the black teacher as a mentor and father figure.

“I do think in a way that the black schoolteacher is an intellectual and emotional portrait of myself,” said Fugard. “I stand for what he stands for--the faith in the power of words which I have him articulate in this play. He’s a man who believes in non-violence.”

The theater’s pursuit of Fugard’s play began as far back as last August when Susan Hilferty, who designed the set for its premiere at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa in June, came to the Playhouse to design “The Misanthrope” and told McAnuff about the play. McAnuff read the script and--through sheer persistence, according to Fugard--persuaded him to direct his first show on the West Coast.

“Des and Robert Blacker (associate director of the Playhouse) read it and they said, ‘My God, we’d like to do this,’ and they stayed very firm in their desire. I drove down to (La Jolla to) see ‘Macbeth’ and that confirmed my desire to do the play here.”

“I think it’s one of the great plays,” confirmed McAnuff. “(It’s) going to be pertinent for a long time to come. There’s just a lot of joy and humanity in the writing. We were lucky he let us read this play when it was hot off the press. Someone watched me reading it, and said before I even said anything, ‘You really liked that play, didn’t you.’ I was very moved.”

All three of the play’s role are being re-cast for La Jolla’s production.

The playhouse season will open with “Twelfth Night,” under McAnuff’s direction, May 13-June 17 at the Mandell Weiss Theatre. The premiere of Reddin’s “Life During Wartime,” a black comedy about a home security system salesman, is slated for June 24-July 29 in the Warren Theatre. Les Waters, who staged Reddin’s “Nebraska” at the playhouse last year, will direct.

Hoyle, whose La Jolla Playhouse production of “The Fool Show” is headed for New York in the spring under the title “Feast of Fools,” is still developing an as yet untitled show to run in the Warren Theatre Aug. 12-Sept. 16.