Life After Apartheid Still a Moral Minefield for Fugard : Stage: The South African playwright’s latest work, ‘Playland,’ has its U.S. premiere Sunday in San Diego.

“At the most basic simple human level, in terms of my own life, how do I live today? It was a question I had to ask in the darkest age of apartheid. Living in South Africa made me feel horror on a par with Nazi Germany. How can I live my life knowing I’m a part of a society like that? Every one of my plays has that question behind it.”

Athol Fugard, the grizzled, 60-year-old South African playwright who has become known as the conscience of his white countrymen, was talking in the lobby of the downtown Lyceum, where the La Jolla Playhouse’s American premiere of “Playland,” his latest work, was in rehearsal under his direction earlier this week.

The show, which opens Sunday at the Lyceum Stage, marks a turning point for the playwright. This time, he is hopeful: “I nail my colors to myself with this play. I finally articulate my deep, deep faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature. I have to believe that men can escape the villainy of their past.

“I have to believe in the redemptive power of experience and that you can break a karma of evil, that personal salvation is possible.”

For decades, Fugard has written of the evils of South African apartheid. His breakthrough play, “The Blood Knot,” cast with a black man and a white man in Johannesburg in 1961, later shocked the South African government when it was televised internationally in 1967, and resulted in four years of internal exile for the writer.

There were years he was attacked for his beliefs, but he never wavered in his art. And he never gave up on his native land.

But where the early plays debated the realities of apartheid, this one is about the next phase. “Playland,” like “Blood Knot,” sets up a confrontation between a black man and a white man in South Africa--but this time, it takes place on New Year’s Eve, 1989. Now, it is the aftermath of apartheid, which is in a slow, painful process of dissolution, that is the issue.

The characters of Gideon, the white officer, and Martinus, the black watchman, meet and talk in an amusement park called Playland, where they find they each are carrying emotional baggage--in one, anger, in the other, guilt--that keeps them from getting on with their lives.

As the issues emerge in this 90-minute, intermissionless play, Fugard also offers a road to healing, suggesting that neither race will be able to seize opportunities for peace unless the past is acknowledged, whites ask for forgiveness and blacks are able to forgive.

“This comes out of a situation where we are asking ourselves that precise question of how do we got on with it? How do we live? How do I take a South Africa with accumulated wrongdoing in the system behind me and hatred and anger on the part of our fellow black South Africans? How do we move?” Fugard said.

With his dark, penetrating eyes, Fugard speaks with a passion that underlies his belief that every encounter is important--even a seemingly routine interview.

“The question at the most basic level is what I do with you and what you do with me. What you do with your life, the way you live your life is of profound consequence to the well-being of the whole human race.”

In the end, he suggests, it all comes down to a sense of family, because for Fugard, family is the central building block of life. Married, with one daughter, he builds families wherever he goes. “I’m a domestic animal,” he once said. “Both in my personal life and in my professional life.”

He shows his commitment to building families in his loyalty to his country (South Africa is the only place where he will write, and it is also where he has premiered all but one of his plays), to his artistic team (nearly every member of the “Playland” team is someone he has worked with many times before), and to the La Jolla Playhouse, where he is now working for the third time in three years.

After more than a dozen years of presenting his work in the United States, he has also developed a relationship with this country--which he does not think is all that different from South Africa. America may not practice apartheid, he points out, but it has ghettos. It may not have military skirmishes between the races, but it had the Los Angeles riots.

And, citing the racial innuendoes of references to Willie Horton by the Bush campaign during the 1988 presidential elections, Fugard said: “I couldn’t believe America was going to end up with a President who had resorted to that vile kind of character assassination.”

Fugard does not think that he personally is above judgment either. He does not come across as in the least self-righteous. In fact, “Playland” was an exhausting play for him to write, he said, because it required him to get inside the guilt of his white character.

Fugard did not “commit the sixth,” as Gideon did--referring to Gideon’s breaking of the sixth commandment--Thou Shalt Not Kill. But like other white South Africans, even those who criticized the system, he admits to having benefited from its inequities in the opportunities that the system has provided him and other whites.

“I found writing this one of the most emotionally exhausting and draining in my 50 years of writing. To be inside Gideon’s head, embracing evil. As a writer, you can’t write the play if you don’t try and get inside the heart and the soul. As you sit down with the pen in your hand, you’ve got to live it--day after day after day.”

Yet while writing the play exhausted him, in the process he rediscovered the potent Christian symbols he had believed in as a boy. Even though Fugard, the adult, considers himself more Buddhist than Christian, he was able to use these symbols to point his characters toward the light.

The light in this latest work also provides a stark contrast with the darkness of “A Lesson From Aloes,” which he directed and starred in at the Playhouse in 1991--a play in which one character is left, at the end, abandoned and alone, barely hanging on.

Much change has come since those days of absolute distrust and alienation. But, in “Playland” Fugard argues that yesterday’s anger still needs to become today’s forgiveness. And that has not happened yet, he says now, in tones of frustration, pointing to the fact that to date, South African President Frederik W. de Klerk has refused to acknowledge the depth of the government’s wrongdoing.

“White South Africa is still very reluctant to admit that apartheid was quite simply evil and ask forgiveness. To talk about it as a misguided political theory--you can’t do that. You must acknowledge responsibility and say I did wrong, forgive me.”

Fugard said the reception in Johannesburg for his play confirmed his feeling of hope--particularly the response from blacks in the audience.

“The previews provided me with the most moving experience. At the end of the play when people jumped to their feet, black people were the first to rise. When I saw black men up there I was so humbled and I thought, for God’s sake, De Klerk, there is still miraculously a fund of such generosity of spirit and preparedness to forgive in the hearts of black South Africa. Let’s not squander it.”

“Playland,” 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays , 7 p.m. Sundays with Saturday/Sunday matinees at 2, through Oct. 2. Tickets $19.75-$29.75. At the Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego, (619) 534-3960 and (619) 235-8025.