WRITINGS ON THE WALL : Athol Fugard Sees a Way Past Apartheid, in ‘Playland’

Given the obsessive biblical references in “Playland,” Athol Fugard’s latest drama about the existential dilemma of his native South Africa, you’d think the author was a devout churchgoer.

But, as the renowned playwright made clear in a telephone interview last week from Princeton, N.J., he doesn’t even consider himself a Christian.

“When people ask if I am, I tell them no,” Fugard said, his bird-like voice lending the words a crisp and definitive ring. “I was brought up as one, but I am not any longer.”

Nevertheless, he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to shake off his powerful Calvinist upbringing.

In fact, when it came to writing “Playland,” which opens Friday in a revival on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, he discovered the grip of his religious heritage was stronger than ever.

Fugard, who at 61 has long been South Africa’s foremost dramatist, recalled that he “became conscious time and again of a Christian subtext” to his daily experience during the work’s creation.

He cited as a prime example “the horrendous photograph” that triggered “Playland” in the first place.

“It was,” Fugard explained, “a photograph of two white South African soldiers on the back of a truck lowering the body of a dead freedom fighter into a mass grave. I saw it on the front page of my newspaper in Port Elizabeth.

“The photographer had clicked the shutter at the precise moment when each of the soldiers had hold of an arm. It was a latter-day crucifixion image. Those were two Roman centurions taking Christ down from the cross.

“As I said, I am emphatically not a Christian. But from Day One to the very end (of writing this play) I was haunted by Christian imagery--in the accidents of my life and in my thoughts.”

Letting his imagination roam, Fugard turned one of those white soldiers into “Playland’s” Gideon le Roux, now in civilian life and looking to celebrate New Year’s Eve, 1989, at a traveling amusement park camped near a small town in the Karoo, South Africa’s arid tableland.

The drama has only one other character, apart from the offstage voice of a carnival barker, and that is the amusement park’s black night watchman, Martinus Zoeloe, who casts a cold and cynical eye on the New Year’s celebration.

The confrontation between Gideon and Martinus represents a dark night of the soul. Each is plagued by guilt--Gideon for the many killings he committed during South Africa’s traumatic Border War against the guerrilla forces of now-independent Namibia and Martinus for killing the white man who raped his wife.

“Both of these men are ghosts haunted by murder,” Fugard reflected. “But I think the end of the play suggests they have the possibility of returning to life.”

A prolific writer who speaks of having “appointments” with his plays, Fugard considers this 1992 stage work an outgrowth of “My Children! My Africa!”

That 1989 drama, which he has come to regard “quite simply as my favorite,” was an emotionally wrenching meditation on the riots that swept the black townships of South Africa during the mid-’80s.

Its doomed central figure, the anguished black schoolmaster Mr. M., held out the hope that the youth of the country--both black and white--might one day save their society from the racist curse of apartheid.

But even with its sweet faith in reason and its moving plea for humanity (“The beautiful Mr. M. was an intellectual self-portrait,” Fugard says), “My Children! My Africa!” still embodied what could only be called hope for a distant future.

“Playland,” Fugard’s 19th drama in 33 years, has updated his sense of events and brought him closer to the sort of prescription he believes is necessary for justice without violence to prevail in South Africa.

“I needed to write this one to prepare myself for the huge challenge we are facing now that apartheid is being dismantled,” said Fugard, who directed “Playland’s” 1992 world premiere in Johannesburg as well as the La Jolla Playhouse’s American premiere, also that year, in San Diego. “It is a step forward in my evolution as a writer.”

“A couple of years before the release of Nelson Mandela (in 1990), it became obvious to any informed observer of the South African scene that the government had started to read the writing on the wall. A lot of people in power were realizing they could not hang on to white minority rule indefinitely, and that we were headed for big change.

“To the extent that I became aware of this, I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘All right, so things are going to change. But in what way? Where are we going to go? What will change mean? How will we facilitate it?’ And it became clear to me that white South Africans would have to acknowledge responsibility for those 40 years of apartheid and what they did to the black people of South Africa.

“Without white South Africa realizing what it had done--and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness--there can really be no significant movement. Just as, equivalently, it would need a matching act of courage on the part of black South Africa to hear and to believe that and to find the bigness of heart to say, ‘I forgive you.’ ”

Even to contemplate that kind of reciprocity seems nothing short of miraculous to Fugard, who believed for decades that a national paroxysm of violence would be not just the likely resolution to his country’s dilemma but the unavoidable one.

While he always wanted his plays to serve as healing influences, more often than not they came off as storm warnings. And because they invariably carried profound moral force--whether overtly political or deeply personal--they irrevocably changed South African theater. They also thrust him into the spotlight as an internationally acclaimed voice of conscience.

Fugard’s plays are so widely revived these days--from his Port Elizabeth trilogy of the ‘60s (“The Blood Knot,” “Hello and Goodbye” and “Boesman and Lena”) to his Afrikaaner trilogy of the late-’70s and early-’80s (“A Lesson From Aloes, “Master Harold . . . and the boys “ and “The Road to Mecca”)--that playgoers are liable to come across them almost anywhere.

Next month in Orange County alone, no fewer than five of his dramas will be mounted by four different theater troupes.

In addition to SCR’s professional staging of “Playland” in Costa Mesa, the South Orange County Community Theatre is offering “The Road to Mecca” (today- through Feb. 19) and a reading of “My Children! My Africa!” (Feb. 17-20) at the Camino Real Playhouse in San Juan Capistrano. The amateur Ensemble Theatre is doing “Master Harold . . . and the boys” (Feb. 26 and 27) also at the playhouse. And UC Irvine’s drama department is staging “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act” (Feb. 10-13) at the Fine Arts Village Theatre on the UCI campus.

Fugard, who was in Princeton to direct a professional revival of “Hello and Goodbye” at the McCarter Theatre (Feb. 1-20), has no illusions that his worldwide reputation gives him any real political clout or social influence back home.

He says the white Establishment of his country considers him “a pinko” beyond the pale, and the militant black leadership dismisses him as a presumptuous white man who can’t speak for black South Africans.

Caught in that cross-fire, Fugard has described himself in the past as “a harmless old liberal fossil.” And he has harbored serious doubt that his plays could affect the larger outcome of events.

“In the darkest years of apartheid,” he explained, “I was always conscious of how desperate the need was to have men of significant action. Real action, not just words, not just platitudes, not just rhetoric, but action. And that continues to be the case.

“For most of my writing life I’ve refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa.

“Whether I was correct or not is a different issue. But it was out of that sense of my personal impotence that I described myself as an old liberal fossil.

“Now that is changing. I’ve reached a point where I realize that writing is, in fact, a profoundly significant form of action--that writing is action. And I have tried to embody that manifesto, that faith in the written and spoken word, in the plays themselves.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is his vision of himself as “a miniaturist” whose works can be packed into a suitcase and staged on little more than a spare platform. He says “small is beautiful” became his credo mainly because of the humble circumstances in which he found himself when he first began writing for the theater.

“If the plays weren’t simple and the casts kept small, they would never have seen the light of day. Nobody wanted to do them, so I had to do them myself.”

Given his sense of proportion, it is perhaps not surprising to hear him express distaste for the idea--put forward by his most ardent literary advocates--that his body of work merits the Nobel Prize.

“I just can’t listen to that stuff,” he said. “If I put that stuff into my life, you know what damage it’s going to do? It’s going to screw me up. The thing is, nothing that lies behind me helps me write the next new one.

“You could give me five Nobel Prizes, but God Almighty, I will be as Angst -ridden, I will be as insecure, I will be as frightened and uncertain of myself as I was with every play I have written so far.”

What

Athol Fugard’s “Playland.”

When

Preview performance today, Jan. 27, at 8 p.m. Opens Friday, Jan. 28, and runs through Feb. 27. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.

Where

South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts

San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street; exit north, turn right onto Town Center Drive.

Wherewithal

$23 to $33. (Tonight’s preview performance is $15 to $19.)

Where to call

(714) 957-4033.