Athol Fugard: S. Africa Is Always With Him

In an entry from his published “Notebooks, 1960-1977,” Athol Fugard comes up with a seemingly improbable quote from Queen Victoria: “No civilization is complete that does not make provision for the dumb and defenseless creatures of God’s creation.”

Improbable for her maybe, but not for him. The one constant of Fugard’s plays--aside from their inextricable link with his native South Africa--is his extraordinarily deep, even profound, human sympathy, which is not to be confused with sentimentality. It’s a rigorous, closely observed, punishingly detailed identification with his characters and their situations that reaches so deep that it seems to collect like blood around a basic human root--just the way South Africa itself appears compressed on the bottom of the world like the tapered base of an immense geographic tooth.

What Harold Pinter said of Samuel Beckett could also be said of Fugard, who has rivaled Beckett as the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent playwright: “He leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.” The similarity rests on Fugard’s uncanny ability to get to the heart of a matter and find those sympathies that far transcend specifics--he’s a regional writer whose penetration of locale has helped make South Africa an international metaphor for sorrow and racial strife, for the personal human breath imperishably alive under a brutal political machine and modernism’s leveling abstractions. He’s won numerous awards, including two Tonys. It’s not unlikely that at some point in his career he could win a Nobel Prize.

His latest play, “My Children! My Africa!,” which has its West Coast premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse Aug. 26, deals with a black township schoolboy and a white schoolgirl who are brought together by a black teacher, Mr. M., to represent their school in regional debates. They begin by debating each other. The speech by the black student, Thami, says in part:

“The opposition has spoken about sexual exploitation and the need for women’s liberation. Brothers and sisters, these are foreign ideas. Do not listen to them. They come from a culture, the so-called Western Civilization, that has meant only misery to Africa and its people. It is the same culture that shipped away thousands of our ancestors as slaves, the same culture that has exploited Africa with the greed of a vulture during the period of colonialism, and the same culture which continues to exploit us in the 20th Century under the disguise of concern for our future.”

Counters Isabel, the schoolgirl: “I believe most strongly that there are values and principles in traditional African society which could be studied with great profit by . . . Western Civilization. But at the same time, I know, and you know, that Africa no longer lives in that past. For better or worse, it is part now of the 20th Century and all the nations on this continent are struggling very hard to come to terms with that reality. Arguments about sacred traditional values . . . are used by those who would like to hold back Africa’s progress and keep it locked up in the past.”

Is this an obscure high school in the South African Karoo, or is it the streets of racially divided Bensonhurst, where black crowds yell at each other about who is more African than whom?

“I always set out to show a brotherhood,” Fugard said recently, as he was gearing up for rehearsals at the Playhouse. His associate director and longtime friend, Susan Hilferty, also works as a designer with the Playhouse and was instrumental in bringing the play there instead of to the Mark Taper Forum, where Fugard’s plays normally have their local debuts.

“With ‘My Children! My Africa!,’ it was time to acknowledge the extraordinary inspiration of young South Africans. 1984 was a period of great unrest in South Africa. It looked like that was the year when the country was going to blow apart. It’s inexplicable how certain things touch you on the shoulder and say, ‘Remember me? We have an appointment.’ The front pages of the newspapers were full of the horrors of the period. But it was this little item that stopped me. In a small hinterland Karoo town, a mob of blacks assaulted a teacher and necklaced him. That was all. Those were the facts.” (“Necklacing” refers to murdering someone by igniting a gasoline-soaked tire around his neck.)

At the moment, his thoughts were divided between the play and the daily political developments in South Africa, which he was monitoring closely. Where once he said, “I cannot see sanity prevailing in South Africa,” now he was feeling cautious optimism.

“The whites know this old system has to go,” Fugard said. “The unbanning of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the freeing of political prisoners, the unbanning of all the people who’d been silenced under court order, and the release of Nelson Mandela--at first I didn’t believe it. For years the government had created an atmosphere of suspicion, but now I think it’s imperative to give the government trust. . . . It’s amazing to see how how rich Mandela is and how stunted is (president Frederik W.) de Klerk’s capacity for soulful giving--though it’s clear he’s struggling with the limitations of fear and prejudice that have been thrust on him. For you in the West to hear the phrase ‘All men are created equal’ is to draw a yawn. For us it’s a miracle. We’re starting out at rock bottom , man. But South Africa does have soul.”

His thoughts returned to “My Children! My Africa!”

“The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery,” Fugard said. “I meditated on that teacher, and then the young people of South Africa. I had to acknowledge them and how extraordinary it is that they’re fighting for a sense of decency under a system that’s been imposed on them. The teacher gave me an opportunity to lay out my testament of faith in what I did as a man of the theater.

“It gave me the opportunity to articulate my faith in the power of the spoken and written word. There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life. There have been moments when I’ve said, ‘Put away the pens and paper and go learn to make bombs.’ But I feel if I ever broke the silken thread of faith, I would not have gotten it back.”

To spend any time with Fugard is to become reacquainted with the temper of his plays, which echo in his personality. He has the storyteller’s innate skill at creating intimacy with a subject through mood and evocative detail, and a born actor’s emotional transparency as well; his mirth gusts through him, his griefs tie up his whippet-thin frame, and he moves visibly through the writer’s classic unending struggle to harness a thought, nail down a phrase.

He has a face that belongs more to the 19th Century than to the 20th. Its lean angularity tapers into a forward-thrusting beard that gives him the commemorative look of an explorer, a sea captain or a weathered field-commander--a stern, dure visage staring obdurately into endless vistas of the unknown tinged with unimaginable hostility. His intense, recessed eyes are a dark agate color and seem to blacken as he recalls pain or grief. He’s a good, eager listener and an easy laugher (“Chaplin had a motto, ‘If the flesh does not laugh in mockery and delight at the world around it, and itself, the flesh will die.’ ”).

Part of his interview took place in one of the playhouse offices and part on a trail of the Torrey Pines Reserve, which snaked along the top of a bluff overlooking the Pacific (“It’s called the Fleming Loop,” he later told Hilferty. “Sounds like a gynecological device, doesn’t it?”). During the ‘60s he had written in his notebook, “How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I’ve always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I’ve always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.”

He peered down below. In bright sunlight, the ocean off La Jolla had a bit more of a tropical, aquamarine glow than the darker, blue-black color it has further north, and the mid-size waves rolled ashore in frolicsome crests. “I had a place on the beach in Port Elizabeth that had a view like this,” he said. “Then I moved a couple of miles inland.” Why? “Every time a black friend visited my house, a neighbor informed the police.”

In 1967, the South African government seized his passport and in effect sentenced him to an internal exile that lasted for four years. (His phone was tapped, his mail was opened, and he was subjected to frequent interrogations.) Not that he would’ve chosen to leave anyway. He was in England with his wife when he heard of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, in which 71 demonstrators among a group protesting South African pass laws were gunned down by police. His response was to return home at once. In a 1982 interview in the New Yorker, he explained his decision: “Like Tchaikovsky, I find that I cry very easily when I’m not on my native soil. I do very little crying back there. In Anna Akhmatova’s awesome ‘Requiem’ she says, ‘Under a foreign sky or on a strange land, I was with my people and they suffered.’ That articulates it for me. It is an emotional bind to my country and its people that is without logic.” He still lives in Port Elizabeth, but keeps a second home in Upstate New York.

(“You can always tell when he’s been away from home for too long,” observed Hilferty. “He begins drying up. You feel a melancholy in him.”)

Today he was peering out over the Pacific, but he was thinking of home, and the events he was observing from afar. “My plane had just touched down in Johannesburg when I heard of De Klerk’s decision to release Nelson Mandela,” he said. “Like any other South African I said, ‘What’s the catch?’ But it became clear that Mandela was right when he said De Klerk was a sincere man.

“They’re not talking concessions now; they’re talking about restructuring the society. The first meeting between the African National Congress and the government has taken place. The rabid response of the white fascist neo-conservatives is a sign of the government’s effectiveness--they’re bombing the country the way the ANC used to do. What people don’t realize is that Mandela has problems of his own with the militant young blacks. They want victory and subjugation of the whites, not a negotiated settlement. And I worry about Mandela’s total allegiance to the ANC, which won’t make peace with the Inkatha movement--which is made up of the Zulu majority.

“Still, how does a man like Mandela exist? After 27 years behind bars, the first words he utters are of forgiveness for those who took those years from his life. ‘Come, join us,’ he says. ‘Let us make the future together.’ ”

The subject brought him back to “My Children! My Africa!” “The single most awesome tragedy, the greatest social disaster in the history of South Africa, is the lack of education afforded blacks. We’re not just talking about reading and writing, we’re talking about the ability to get into other viewpoints and understand attitudes other than your own. Education is not just the development of social tools. The real arena of the challenge is in the realm of the soul. Even the ANC is pulling in its head at the sight of a generation that can’t read or write. They’re saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t boycott the schools! Get your education.’ ”

Fugard sees a similar danger in America, a country for which he feels great affection but which alarms him. “It’s even more dangerous in this society, because somehow the angers and frustrations built around the social inequities that exist here are much more poisonous than in South Africa. I’ve stood on a street in New York near Penn Station and listened to a black political group that sets up a soap box and harangues passersby, and I’ve heard more poison, more anger and evil from them than anything I’ve heard in South Africa. The castrating forms of censorship are all around in America. Look at the NEA dispute. America is engaged in economic censorship, of censoring itself beforehand. It’s obvious that television has corrupted literary craft for the theater. Now the attention span is eight minutes, then a blackout for commercial. It plays to the lowest common denominator of human intelligence. The structuring of human experience, the understanding of emotion, is completely falsified. It’s very depressing.”

Fugard later alluded to this mysterious groundswell of American rage when he spoke of casting “My Children! My Africa! in La Jolla. “The young people in my play deal with enormous anger and outrage,” he said. “I wanted to be sure the actors I cast would understand that, so I asked all the actors who auditioned, young and old, about feeling anger. Some of the reponses--particularly if you think all is well with your country--would leave you frightened. You saw bitterness, frustration, anger of a most bitter degree, towards the business and society at large. I’m talking explosive responses.”

He spoke about the experience of Nancy Travis, who plays Isabel (Brock Peters plays Mr. M. and Sterling Macer plays Thami), and what she was up against as a woman. “I went to see the film she made, ‘Internal Affairs.’ She plays a married woman and there’s a scene in a restaurant where her husband accuses her of having an affair with Richard Gere. She’s innocent. The audience knows it, the husband doesn’t. He slaps her around in public. The audience cheered. I couldn’t believe it. It was horrible to sit in the middle of that savagery.”

Fugard was born Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard in Middleburg on June 11, 1932. His father was a jazz pianist who lost a leg in a childhood shipboard accident; lifelong complications forced an early retirement and a decline into alcoholism and inactivity. His mother was a matriarchal life force for the family (Fugard also has a brother and sister) and a good businesswoman. In 1941 she took over a Port Elizabeth cafe called the St. George’s Park Tearoom, the setting of his “Master Harold . . . and the Boys.” She doesn’t appear in the play, but his shamed allusions to his father are echoed in his contention, “I have a deep-rooted sense of male ineffectuality.”

“I’ve never properly acknowledged my dad’s influence on me,” Fugard says now. “He was a great storyteller. One of my vivid memories is sitting at my father’s bedside. The pain in what he called his ‘gammy’ leg was often unbearable. In return for my massaging it with the 1950s equivalent of Deep Heat called Oil of Wintergreen--I can smell it now--he told stories. We had a candle bedside so that we wouldn’t disturb my mom. He loved Jack London, mystery thrillers, Bram Stoker, the Victorians. He’d put them in a nutshell and spin them out. I owe him the debt of my craft because I consider myself a storyteller.”

Of his mother, Fugard recalls, “A formidable lady. She paced me in my questioning, my examining and doubting the world in which I found myself. I’ll never forget the way we did things together, the way she discovered her outrage, which didn’t diminish but unfolded as she got older. She was a woman of righteous anger. Once when she was baking at the tea room, her bare arms covered with flour, she looked up and said, ‘I shouldn’t be making scones, I should be making bombs.’

“She wasn’t just formidable, she was big, big ! It’s no accident that the most affirmative influences in my life have been women. I think it’s true anywhere, black and white women sustaining their men. It’s deep, extraordinary, mysterious. Is there a bigger word than mother ? Where do we have an expression that’s as primitive, as archetypal, as that: passing on life that links one with all life. She had awe, a primitive capacity for wonder that turned on like a tap. She was a rainbow. She drew no distinctions between reality and her dream life--Jung would’ve embraced her. Towards the end of her life, the dreams became powerfully religious. She told me once of witnessing the Crucifixion and hearing Christ groan as he pulled the cross up the hill. She couldn’t stand it and picked up the long end to help. She described what it sounded like to hear the nails driven into his hands.

“If you’ve inherited these qualities, you have a big debt of gratitude.”

Fugard took a scholarship at the Port Elizabeth Technical School to study auto mechanics (his mechanical skills have aided him enormously in the construction of his plays) and later took another scholarship at the University of Cape Town, where he studied philosophy and social anthropology, and spent his extracurricular time as an amateur boxer. In 1953, just before graduation, he decided to quit school. (“If I’d got that degree,” he said in the New Yorker interview, “I could have been trapped into doing things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to teach. I just had a sense of horizons shrinking as I got nearer the end of university.”) Instead, he hitchhiked the length of Africa with a friend and wound up broke in Port Sudan six months later, and from there signed on with a steamship bound for Japan. He was the only white man on board a ship full of Sudanese and Malaysians; it was his first experience in living with people of other races.

“Those two years when I was a sailor were extraordinary,” he said. “I realized just the other day how character-forming they were. Being a young white South African struggling with an accepted tradition of how to be with men of color, and how those traditions were wrong--it was a muddle and a confusion. But in the end, how clarifying it was.”

Back home in Port Elizabeth, Fugard tried his hand at journalism, but found himself temperamentally unsuited to the dry conventions of reportage. He met and married another aspiring writer, Sheila Meiring. Both of them became interested in the theater (around this time, 1957, he wrote his first play, a short work called “The Cell,” which premiered in a theater they founded in Cape Town). The Fugards relocated to Johannesburg, where Athol took a job as a clerk in a court that tried passbook cases. The job, which he described as “a nightmare,” lasted only three months, but made a powerful impression on him when he saw how blacks brought in on charges of not carrying their government passes were completely deprived of due process (the experience later inspired one of his greatest successes, co-authored with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead”).

Fugard became a stage manager for South Africa’s National Theatre Organization and began spending time in the black township of Sophiatown with black writers and others interested in starting a theater. He wrote “No-Good Friday” and “Klaas and the Devil,” followed by “Nongogo,” the story of an ex-prostitute who runs a saloon, and “A Place for the Pigs,” which deals with a soldier who has been in hiding for 40 years. The works were performed for private audiences, but there wasn’t much opportunity in South Africa at that time for playwrights with a new--especially local--voice.

The Fugards moved to London to study theater; she worked as an office temp and he took up domestic housecleaning. (The Royal Court Theater not only wouldn’t consider his plays, they wouldn’t hire him as a stagehand either.) Fugard still views Great Britain with a certain misgiving, for political as well as personal reasons, though his plays are regularly performed there. (“My Children! My Africa!” opens at the National Theatre this fall, with his daughter, on whom he still dotes, calling her “my beautiful Lisa,” appearing as Isabel.)

“To this day, the British are rotten with class attitudes and prejudices,” Fugard said. “It was they who first defined apartheid, but they don’t acknowledge the significant hand they played in race relations in South Africa.”

Sheila Fugard’s pregnancy with their daughter and news of the Sharpeville Massacre brought the Fugards back to South Africa. He wrote a novel called “Tsotsi,” and then went to work on “The Blood Knot,” in which he cast himself as the light-skinned Morris and Zakes Mokae as the darker-skinned Zach. He had been working with a young director named Barney Simon as well in a warehouse rehearsal space known as the Dorkay House.

“Athol and I would stand at the window, watching the traffic come down the street,” recalled Simon. “We’d wonder if any of the cars were going to stop at the theater.”

In a single October, 1961, performance before an steamy overcrowded house of friends, journalists and other theater professionals, the play ran uncut for four hours and revolutionized South African theater, much as John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” had permanently altered the course of British theater--South Africa had never seen a local interracial play like this before and had never heard the country’s indigenous language expressed with such theatrical purity.

“All my plays before that had been apprenticeship works,” Fugard said. “I had set out to copy the masters, your Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill. Not the British. The Americans seemed to have that raw, gutsy, emotionally charged quality I wanted to write about in my people. With ‘Blood Knot,’ I finally discovered my own voice, the language, structure and style that were uniquely mine.”

In 1963, a group of black men knocked on his door in Port Elizabeth. They were from a local township called New Brighton, and had heard of this fellow who had staged interracial plays. None of them had had any theater experience, but their collaboration with Fugard into a new troupe called the Serpent Theatre resulted in one of the most productive periods in Fugard’s career (this was the period that produced “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island”). Other plays around this time, some with with the Serpent Theatre and some with his friend and associate, actress Yvonne Bryceland, included “The Cure” (1963), “People Are Living There” (1968), “Hello and Goodbye” (1969), “Friday’s Bread on Monday”(1970), “Boesman and Lena” (1969), “Orestes”(1971) and “Dimetos”(1975).

Some of the plays enjoyed a life outside South Africa and others didn’t, but after “Sizwe Banzi” Fugard’s work entered a more mature phase; everything he wrote met with international interest, including “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act” (1974), “A Lesson From Aloes” (1979), “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” (1982, his only play that did not premiere in South Africa) and “The Road to Mecca” (1984).

“My Children! My Africa” opened at the Market Theater in Johannesburg in June of 1989 and had its American premiere at the New York Perry Street Theater in December. The La Jolla Playhouse production marks the West Coast debut of both the play and Fugard as director (he frequently acts in and directs his plays, and played Gen. Smuts in the film “Gandhi”).

Fugard is a meticulous craftsman who writes the first draft of each play at home in Port Elizabeth with a different fountain pen and specially mixed ink. (“To be a playwright is to be a maker of plays, like a wheelwright,” he says. “You make a play like you make a table. You make it. It isn’t just a matter of inspiration.”) But inspiration does play its part. In addition to searching out what he calls his “fulcrum moments,” those devices that quicken a play’s hidden pulse, he usually puzzles one or more central, talismanic images.

For “My Children! My Africa!,” there’s the image of a mountain pass. “I had Mr. M. holding a dictionary in one hand and a stone in the other to talk about how one had so much more power than the other--the dictionary has 60,000 words, the stone just one--but I didn’t know where to go from there,” Fugard said. “I knew I had to make Isabel go one step farther, but I didn’t know what to do. I went for a run on one of the hottest days of the year in Port Elizabeth. After four miles, I suddenly--it just came to me. I realized that Isabel had to pledge herself, to commit. I ran the next three miles crying tears of release--I’d been so bottled up. There was a beat to the end--Isabel at the mountain pass--I didn’t have to make up. It was already there. I sat down sweating and wrote it out.”

The allusion is to the boyhood of Mr. M., when en route to a rugby match, his class stops at the mountainous Wapadsberg Pass on the road to Cradock. The immense vista spread before him grips his heart. His asks his teacher what lies in that direction. North, is the answer, and if his little legs will carry him, he can wander the length of Africa and meet all his brothers. But if his little legs can’t, he can meet them in books. So begins Mr. M.’s introduction to the power of the word. In the end, Isabel will seek out that pass. They are of different races, different generations, different sexes, and even a different consciousness, but standing on the same spot, they cannot help but share the same vision.

“I’d been living in London and had seen the Bolshoi and Brecht and worked with Joan Littlewood,” said Barney Simon, who in Johannesburg in 1976 co-founded the Market Theatre, which is now considered on a par with the Moscow Arts Theater, the Abbey and the Berliner Ensemble for the inspired concentration of its output. “Back in Johannesburg I saw one of Athol’s early works, ‘No-Good Friday,’ and as amateurish as it was, it excited me as much as anything I’d seen. I felt an instant rapport and electricity with Athol. In his lyricism, he did for the South African language in the theater what Sean O’Casey did for the Irish. In a similar way he’s a strong expression of the paradoxes and absurdity of existence--all great theater is tragicomic.

“ ‘My Children! My Africa!’ is a very bold work for this time,” Simon continued. “He argues that the word comes first, but I argue that his vision and impulse come first. His vision is extraordinary. And he’s always had the courage to inform what he does with his own pain and damage. I’m not talking about personal confession. I mean really the true source, arrived at the hardest way, alone in front of a blank page.”

For a while before the conversation with Simon, the phone line to his Johannesburg apartment was down and it didn’t look like an interview would be possible. A return to Fugard’s notebooks seemed in order during the wait, and this passage seemed as characteristic as any:

“People must be loved. That is the really crucifying experience in the short time we have as human beings--that intimacy which breaks through our defensive isolation and shows the capacity--if need be no more than that--just the awareness of a potential--of someone else’s suffering.”