His ‘Song’ of Hope : Playwright Fugard Faces Changes That Were Unthinkable Just a Few Years Ago

Late in Athol Fugard’s new play, “Valley Song,” one of the characters, identified in the program as simply “the Author,” says: “The truth is I’m not as brave about change as I’d like to be. It involves letting go of things, and I’ve discovered that is a lot harder than I thought it was.”

The line particularly resonates for Fugard who, as one of the leading theatrical voices of South Africa’s political and social complexities, is now facing changes in his country that were almost unthinkable a few years ago. For the past 40 years, in such works as “Master Harold . . . and the boys,” “A Lesson From Aloes” and “The Blood Knot,” the playwright challenged his country’s white minority government, painting a picture of the terrible toll of apartheid. Now that a black majority under Nelson Mandela has taken power--”a political miracle,” Fugard said--the dramatist has written what he calls “a transitional play.”

“You never write ‘an idea,’ you write about real people. But this is a play that straddles the present, with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, and that is where South Africa is right now,” he said recently, sitting in one of the seats of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage II, where “Valley Song” opened earlier this month to favorable reviews. “To suddenly face challenges as huge and as awesome as those that have come into my life by way of this extraordinary political drama is very intimidating.”

At 62, the playwright’s weather-beaten and lined face, set off with penetrating eyes, mirrors the harsh but handsome landscape of his home on the southern tip of South Africa, where “Valley Song” takes place. The play is a loosely autobiographical 90-minute meditation on the lives of three people living at the edge of the Karoo, a semiarid region where Fugard bought a farm in the ‘70s. In the play, a big-city writer becomes connected with Buks, a Colored tenant farmer, and his granddaughter, Veronica, played by New York actress Lisa Gay Hamilton.

Fugard directs “Valley,” and also has taken on the roles of both the Author and Buks. The white Author is a cool observer of the emotionally charged proceedings sparked by 15-year-old Veronica, who defies her beloved grandfather to fulfill her dream to be a singer in Johannesburg. Buks fears that the dangers that swamped his daughter, Veronica’s mother, will engulf her as well, but Veronica yields to the call of “progress.”

The dangers in “Valley Song” are largely domestic, and the intergenerational clash is a timeless and universal one. But the drama also expresses the bewilderment of an older generation facing a new South Africa. For Fugard, it is a sobering time, especially since the euphoria induced by the first democratic elections now has yielded to what he calls “the daunting magnitude of the task of nation-building.”

Just 20 months into the new administration, the playwright said that it is too early to say how the arts are coping in his homeland. “We’re trying to figure that one out,” Fugard said. “If we turn out to have a society that is open with all the safeguards and guarantees that go with democracy, the role of the artist as vigilante or watchdog will no longer be necessary. The artist will be free to take on a much broader mandate. But if things go wrong, who knows? Then maybe we will once again have to diagnose the social ills. Everyone is waiting to see.”

More immediate is the need for artists to participate in creating a new national unity. “The challenge is how we bring together all these separate elements that were kept apart--suspicious and ignorant of each other--by apartheid,” he said. “There’s no question the arts have a primary role to play in bridging those chasms. We mustn’t lose that rich cultural diversity and the sparks that come from these contacts between peoples. It will be a real juggling act that the writers of the future will have to take on.”

Hitting even closer to home is the increasing polarization between whites and blacks. In fact, widely reported “white flight” from South Africa has created an economic crisis. And Fugard said there is a sizable segment of the black majority that believes whites no longer have a role to play in the country’s political reality. Fugard, however, has no intention of either leaving or being “sidelined,” as he put it.

“Someone said to me that maybe I will now be the spokesman for the white people in the way that I was for the blacks,” he said, wearily chuckling at the irony. “The stuff of my drama has always been desperate people--white, Colored and black--so I wouldn’t find it an impossible task.”

In fact, Fugard is hopeful that he will be able to turn away from his country’s “darkness, misery and pain” and toward other themes, among them his own Afrikaner heritage. Given that apartheid was put into place largely by Afrikaners, that heritage has been vilified, but Fugard, pointing out that Buks is an Afrikaner, said there is a “beautiful and rich cultural tradition to sing about onstage.”

Describing himself as an optimist by nature, he said that someone had pointed out to him that he had never before written a play in which hope for the present is as powerful as it is in “Valley Song.” “Veronica’s belief and faith really ignites that hope,” he said. “And I feel as she does about my country’s present and its future. It has a destiny to fulfill for Africa and for the world. You look at the mess that Africa is in right now and you realize how hugely significant Mandela is not only to the continent but to the world. What is truly remarkable is the possibility that a nation once so despised might end up being a role model.”

There is a certain elegiac melancholy to “Valley Song” and to Fugard as he talks about the time he has left to “sing the songs” on the stage. After 60, he joked, everything is “downhill,” and he was rueful when he considered that most of his writing life was now behind him.

“To recognize that the great adventure is coming to an end for you personally is always sad,” he said softly. “I’ve committed my whole life to making theater. It’s not entirely over--after all, the two of us, Buks and the Author, go off to plant pumpkinseeds--but we both know the adventures are coming to an end. Yeah. It’s been glorious.”

* “Valley Song,” Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55th St., New York, through Jan. 21, Tuesday-Sunday, 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 3 p.m. $30. (212) 581-1212.