La Jolla Playhouse Woos Fugard’s Latest; Taper Loses Out

Athol Fugard’s choice of the La Jolla Playhouse for the first West Coast presentation of his latest play, “My Children! My Africa!,” may come as something of a surprise to the theater community. Given both his and the Market Theatre’s many previous associations with Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum and its artistic director, Gordon Davidson, La Jolla’s announcement last week that it had wooed the play to its stage in July is a testament to tenacity and the powers of direct contact.

“We simply asked Athol,” says Robert Blacker, La Jolla’s associate director/dramaturge.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple.

La Jolla’s wooing of Fugard began in earnest last August when Susan Hilferty, Fugard’s close companion and “My Children’s” designer, arrived at the Playhouse to costume “The Misanthrope.” Blacker and artistic director Des McAnuff had been trying to develop a relationship with Fugard for several years, and when Hilferty told them about Fugard’s new play and the South African reaction to it, they immediately asked to read it. They then asked her to tell Fugard they wanted to put it on.

“This was our first opportunity to work with a man who is one of the great living writers of the English language,” says Blacker. “Of course we were going to pursue him. He is one of the playwrights who has produced a body of work that is essential to understanding our times. We knew this was something we had to produce.”

“And,” says Fugard, “they never changed their tune. They just kept quietly getting in touch with me and telling me personally, ‘We want to do it. We want to do it. We want to do it.’ I knew that Gordon was interested, too. But I never knew that Gordon really wanted to do it. He never contacted me personally to tell me he wanted the play.”

Davidson seems confused by the whole episode.

“I wanted to do it,” says Davidson. “I tried to arrange for it.” And, he adds, he did in fact leave several messages at the playwright’s home in Upstate New York. Indeed, Davidson worked through Fugard’s agent at William Morris in New York and the American rights-holder to secure those rights. The problem seems to have been a lack of communication.

The play, which premiered to overflow audiences and powerful reviews at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre last summer before moving on to limited runs in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, made its American debut in December at the 99-seat New York Theatre Workshop in Greenwich Village. When Fugard, who was in Los Angeles recently for casting the La Jolla production, talks about his “My Children! My Africa!,” his voice fills with a certain urgency. “They are my children,” he stresses. “It is my Africa.”

While the notices were mixed, audiences remained enthusiastic. “I’ve never had responses like I’ve had to this play,” Fugard says.

“I gather Gordon was even more adamant in his determination to get the play for the Taper after he saw it (in mid-January),” says Fugard, “but even then he didn’t get in touch with me. I would have tried to work out a deal, but as I say, La Jolla came to me. I only committed to La Jolla when I believed Gordon and the Taper were not interested.”

Fugard is on his way back to South Africa for a rest. “I want to be back home when they release Nelson Mandela,” he says. He also wants time to take stock of the play’s experience in New York.

“I’m now convinced that the play works in terms of American audiences,” he says. “I haven’t the slightest doubt anymore. The question in my mind was always whether American audiences would tune into the simple human story, just the story of three people--would they pick up that or would the whole question of, once again, South African politics obscure that? Those anxieties are laid to rest now.”

The new play is a passionate plea for reason over violence, words over stones, told through two students--a white girl named Isabel and a black boy named Thami-- educated in separate schools who are brought together by a peaceful and compassionate black teacher, Mr. M.

Until the teacher ineffably links the two, neither had ever had real contact with, or even heard of, the other race before. John Kani created the role of the teacher at the Market and reprised it in New York, where Courtney B. Vance replaced Rapulana Seiphemo as Thami, and Fugard’s daughter, Lisa, replaced Kathy-Jo Ross as Isabel.

For Fugard, the opening day of rehearsal in Johannesburg was a chilling echo of his play’s essence.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Fugard remembers. “We were starting to explore the material, and I said, ‘So, in terms of your white friends in the past, Thami,’ and he said, ‘I’ve had no white friends.’

“He had never been to a white person’s house. Kathy-Jo had never been to a township. In the rehearsal room, to watch these two parallel what the play is about, what the Market is about, was just extraordinary. And that is what happens in the Market all the time.”

La Jolla audiences will, no doubt, find similar parallels of their own.