Fresh Lessons : Playwright: As South Africa turns away from segregation, Athol Fugard re-examines his 10-year-old play.

Athol Fugard, one of the great playwrights of our time, may have found an American home at the La Jolla Playhouse.

The playwright who has frequently been called “the conscience of white South Africa” will both star in and direct the Playhouse production of his decade-old play,

“A Lesson From Aloes,” opening Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Theatre. The play is about a friendship rife with mistrust between a white couple and a black man in apartheid-governed South Africa.

It will be Fugard’s second play produced at the Playhouse in as many years. He made his West Coast directing debut last year with the acclaimed La Jolla production of “My Children! My Africa!”

With “A Lesson From Aloes,” which he will direct, Fugard will be making his West Coast acting debut. He’s also working on a new play he hopes to give to the Playhouse for an American premiere next season.

“I’m a domesticated animal, both in my personal life and in my professional life,” he said, seated in what he called his “home”--the dusty, garden-like set of “A Lesson From Aloes.”

Several species of aloe plants, native to South Africa but easily found locally, were growing in pots around him. Fugard, who cannot bring himself to write unless he’s in South Africa, said the sight of the plants made him “homesick.”

“A domesticated animal needs a home,” he said. “I need a home for my work, and this has been an extremely welcoming situation. I have had a hugely satisfying experience here. The audiences have been just great. Attentive. Emotionally quick to respond, which makes life easy for the actor.

“I’m looking forward to coming here with a new work, which I hope reflects my degree of pleasure and satisfaction with being so warmly received. When you present a new work, it’s a moment of birth. One wants to give the thing born all the chances it needs. There’s an extraordinary period of vulnerability. I feel that this is a good maternity home.”

Fugard, 59, once had his American home at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Lloyd Richards produced the American premiere of “A Lesson From Aloes” there in 1980, just after Richards took the job of artistic director at the Yale Rep.

The play, Fugard’s first to be performed in the United States, moved to Broadway in the fall of 1980 and received a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Critics Circle Award for best play.

Fugard and Richards worked together for almost a decade, creating such highly acclaimed productions as “Master Harold . . . and the boys” and “The Road to Mecca.”

But the artistic relationship wound to a conclusion four years ago, with a “A Place With the Pigs,” the last play he produced at Yale. As Fugard puts it, “One of the reasons I left Yale was to be challenged. I moved away because I had become part of the furniture. I was taking the situation for granted, and they were taking me for granted.”

Fugard had been restlessly looking for a new place when Des McAnuff, artistic director of the Playhouse, pursued Fugard’s permission to stage “My Children! My Africa!” here last year.

Some would call this evolving relationship with Fugard a coup for the Playhouse. McAnuff said he couldn’t be happier about Fugard’s attachment to his theater.

“I can’t think of a stronger writer, a greater playwright,” McAnuff said. “I want him to feel that he has a home here if he wants it.”

Fugard--a humble man--puts it differently.

“I’m sort of like that person who comes to dinner and ends up marrying your daughter. You should be very careful letting me in the door,” he said, then laughed.

“A Lesson From Aloes” may seem a curious choice for a Playhouse production. It’s an older play, set in 1963, and, although highly regarded at its debut, it evokes an era of strict segregation that even Fugard says has passed--for the most part.

Fugard has experienced the repercussions of apartheid policies firsthand. In 1967 his passport was revoked by the South African government the day after his play “The Blood Knot” aired on British television. His phone was tapped, his mail was opened. He was subjected to frequent interrogation. The persecution ended four years later only after public petition.

His crime was that he was a pioneer in writing interracially cast plays about life in South Africa, in which characters questioned the government’s racist policies, and that he had black friends (“Every time a black friend visited my house, a neighbor informed the police,” he said).

“A Lesson from Aloes,” he said, “was written during one of the darkest and most somber periods of apartheid South Africa.”

To see “light at the end of the tunnel was an act of faith because there wasn’t even a glimmer of it.

“As a political document reflecting a reality in South Africa, ‘A Lesson From Aloes’ is past history,” Fugard said. “The last five years have changed the face of the country in an unbelievable fashion. It was an enormous breakthrough when (Frederik W.) De Klerk became president and released Nelson Mandela.”

But Fugard wants to do the play because it is history.

“I’m doing this play now to test its dramatic worth,” Fugard said. “The question I am asked by journalists and colleagues now is, ‘What are you going to do now that South Africa has changed? Are you going to throw these plays away?’ That’s the challenge that faces me. And now, I’m hoping that they will prove to be good theater, the same way that (although) Chekhov’s world no longer exists, (the world) would be a poorer place without ‘Three Sisters.’

“We’re nervous. There’s no complacency. We’re out there on the edge.”

Fugard’s nervousness is not shared by McAnuff.

“I would call this play a contemporary masterpiece,” McAnuff said. “It’s one of the great plays of our time. Like any great writer, he writes about a world that he understands. But, by exploring that world, he gives us a key to exploring our own world. It’s larger than just South Africa. I think he’s really targeted the key issues facing mankind.”

Fugard has other reasons for wanting to do the play.

He has always wanted to play the part of the Afrikaner Piet Bezuidenhout opposite Maria Tucci, who created the part at Yale and on Broadway.

“Of all the plays that lie behind me, (Piet) is a role I’ve never done before, and I’ve waited a long time to do it,” he said. “After the wonderful production I did at Yale, I wanted to do it opposite Maria Tucci. Apart from being a wonderful human being and friend, I think she is a formidable actress.”

But what the playgoer sees won’t be what was seen at Yale or even in New York.

“One important question was: How do I help Maria forget her New York performance?” Fugard said. “Not that I didn’t like it. But we want to be fresh. We don’t want to remember, we want to create. She has been extraordinary in her craft and her courage in turning her back on the securities of the past.”

Fugard, too, is discovering his own new interpretations, secrets and surprises in the play. As a writer, the work has allowed him to “take stock” in how he felt during the darkest period of apartheid. Looking at this story once again, from the distance of a decade, will also help him bring depth to his portrait of the current, more hopeful South Africa that he is working on now.

“I hope it (the new play) will reflect the fact that I am still connected directly with the changing realities of South Africa,” he said. “That I’m living day to day with the challenges of living with a terrible past, a muddled present, a hopeful future.”

Fugard said he modeled the character of Piet after his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena. He credits her with helping him see, from an early age, the evils of apartheid.

“It was an attempt to celebrate her,” Fugard said. “It’s been very hard for me over the years to watch the Afrikaners cast in the role of the villain. She was a peasant and very Afrikaner, but she had an innate sense of what is fair, what is right and what is wrong. For so many years, people would see the Afrikaner as the thing that had to be destroyed in order to get on with the democracy.

“Now it is an Afrikaner--F.W. De Klerk--who freed Nelson Mandela,” Fugard remarked.

His voice filled with pride as he talked of his mother and De Klerk. Then, suddenly, he remembered that he had gotten the call about his mother’s death while in rehearsal for “A Lesson From Aloes” 11 years ago at Yale. As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears. He didn’t go to the funeral, the playwright said, yet he doesn’t regret it. Fugard said this play is his memorial to his mother’s spirit.

“For me, doing the play was a more profound gesture to her than any bunch of flowers or words at the graveside.”

Performances of “A Lesson From Aloes” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. The show opens Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Theatre and runs through Sept. 29.