In a Brave New World

The first question people want to ask Athol Fugard these days is, “So, Mr. Fugard, what are you going to write about now?”

The playwright, who is synonymous in the theater with South Africa and its once moldering apartheid state, has watched happily in recent years as the white supremacist government that regarded him as a subversive advocate for the country’s black majority has given way to democracy and the presidency of Nelson Mandela. But the popular notion that this political consummation has pulled the premise out from under Fugard’s work is more than a little annoying to a writer who does not strike you as easily annoyed--who, in fact, exhibits in person exceeding good cheer for someone so often compared to Samuel Beckett.

Yet it is with this question, appropriate or not, hanging in the air that Fugard has arrived in Los Angeles to work at the Mark Taper Forum for the first time, bringing with him his newest play, a piece for two actors called “Valley Song,” which he is directing and starring in, along with Lisa Gay Hamilton. The show opens Thursday.

“I think it’s a very naive question because firstly it betrays a total lack of insight into the very complex process which leads eventually to the writing of something,” he said one day after getting to town. He was dressed in a khaki shirt, checked trousers and well-worn running shoes as he sat forward alertly on a couch in a Taper office, his famously expressive hands marking the air in front of his face. “You don’t wake up, having written one play and look around and say, ‘All right, so what’s it going to be about now?’ In my case, every play has been dormant in me for years until it has finally surfaced, before the right moment has come for it to float to the top.”

Perhaps it’s also worth noting that Fugard (he pronounces his name “Fewgard”) is 65, and, considering his estimable output for more than three decades, might be entitled to retire with full dramatic honors now that the segregated society he portrayed in so many of his minimalist landscapes has at last set about correcting its injustice. When he wrote and acted in “The Blood Knot” in his native Port Elizabeth in 1963, it was the first time a black man and a white man had ever been onstage together in South Africa. Later, plays like “Boesman and Lena,” “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” “A Lesson From Aloes” and “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” continued to send out bleak and unsettling pictures of his homeland to theater audiences around the world, while they held up a mirror to his countrymen.

Although he never joined the ANC, Mandela’s African National Congress party (as did some radical whites), Fugard was regarded as sufficiently dangerous by the government that he was denied a passport from 1965 to 1971. Instead, he was offered a one-way visa out.

But he has never wanted to live any place else. South Africa and the culturally remote manufacturing town of Port Elizabeth, where he has lived since his boyhood (except for youthful sojourns to Cape Town and London), are too much a part of who he is, he says. On a recent visit to London, the question occurred to him anew while dining in wonderful restaurants and visiting favorite museums. “I thought, ‘Why do I live in that Godforsaken . . . ?’ But I know why. Because I get the work done. Being a sophisticated, civilized human being--that’s just not for me. I’m a coarse colonial, it’s as simple as that. I know what I am.”

Perhaps it is easy enough to say this when your plays have won a mantle full of theater awards and you have been mentioned as a candidate for a Nobel Prize.

In “Valley Song” Fugard is back in his familiar Karoo province again, this time onstage himself portraying two characters: the first, an aging desert tenant farmer named Buks--a “colored man,” as the South African vernacular describes anyone of mixed racial parentage; the second, a man identified as “the author,” who is both ethereally omniscient and a real-life white intruder threatening to buy the farm out from under Buks and his way of life.

Most of the 95-minute drama is a melancholy dialogue between Buks and his 17-year-old granddaughter Veronica (Hamilton), who has been his housekeeper and only companion for years but is also a fledgling singer harboring dreams of attaining pop stardom in Johannesburg. Buks must reckon with the terrible likelihood of her eventual departure.

Considered something of an allegory representing the hopeful but disruptive change now gripping South Africa, “Valley Song” was very much a critical hit when it opened off-Broadway in 1995 at the Manhattan Theater Club. Since then Fugard and Hamilton have taken the play around the world, though they have been away from it for six months. Los Angeles and then Washington, D.C., are their last two stops, “a sort of lap of honor, as it were,” the playwright said, “before we leave it and go on to other work.” (The play was done last season at the La Jolla Playhouse, without Fugard’s involvement.)

Hamilton, a veteran of the New York Shakespeare Festival, appeared as Grace in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which stopped here at the Doolittle in the spring of 1990.

“When I came the first time with ‘Valley Song’ to America,” Fugard said, referring to the fall of 1995, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I am going to be shot down in flames for the impertinence of playing both the white author, which is myself, and stepping into the character of a colored man. Why not give the role to a colored actor?’ And here I am more than a year after those first performances and I never encountered that criticism once. Which I found incredibly healthy because that seemed to me that audiences and critics have their heads and imaginations where they should be.”

Not that he has always been free of criticism founded on ethnic imperatives.

“Interestingly enough, I’ve encountered only in America, never in South Africa, at question-and-answer time and in scholarly writing about my work the criticism, ‘How do you presume as a white man, having lived in a whites-only world, privileged as it was by virtue of your white skin, to think that you can comprehend what a black reality is, as so many of your plays have blacks in them?’

“And my response is, yes, I know that the gulf between my experience as a white person and a black person’s experience as a black person is a very considerable one, but surely to God that is what the human imagination is all about. It allows me, if I use it properly, to escape the limits of my own personal experience and comprehend what it means to be someone else in a different world. I mean, is the difference between my reality as a white male and that of a black man any different than my experience as a man and that of a woman? And I presume to write about women as well.”

On this subject, Fugard likes to quote Danny Glover, the actor who starred on Broadway in “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” before becoming a Hollywood action hero in the “Lethal Weapon” series. “The plays of Athol Fugard empowered me as a black American,” Glover once said in an interview, which to Fugard still represents “the biggest thing that’s ever come my way in terms of response to my writing from colleagues in the theater.”

A number of Fugard’s plays have been staged at the Taper, over the years, but he has not directed or acted in them. He appeared in a revival of his “A Lesson from Aloes” at the La Jolla Playhouse and has also been seen in small roles in the films “Gandhi” and “The Killing Fields.” He said he acts for the thrill of it. “If you’ve got a degree of talent and you get the opportunity to go out there and act in front of an audience, it can be something you actually get hooked on. There is this incredible sense, not of vulgar power but of a very fine power when you are out there onstage with an audience that is on your side and it’s really going well.”

Reminded that actors in Los Angeles--even former stage stars like Anthony Hopkins--often have been heard to prefer acting in front of the camera to the nightly grind of the theater, Fugard said, “I think it depends on whether you’re a marathon runner or a sprinter. I think a theater actor needs to be a marathon runner. You’ve either got the ability to generate a new excitement each time you step out on the stage or you haven’t.”

He has found audiences to be different in South Africa, New York and Southern California. “I was in the audience for [Tom Stoppard’s] ‘Arcadia’ . . . , and I had a wonderful sense of a generosity here that I don’t think necessarily characterizes a New York audience. It was similar to La Jolla: a feeling that the audience leant forward to the stage and said, ‘Yes, go on, do it to me, be good, I want to have a good time with you.’ In New York, I am so conscious of an audience sitting back and saying, ‘OK, show me what you can do.’ It’s a helluva difference, and you can really feel it as an actor, a kind of jaded pseudo-sophistication that you can sometimes suddenly find yourself up against on the New York stage.”

Back home is yet another audience, mostly a white liberal audience “relatively unsophisticated,” he says, compared to what he encounters in the United States or Britain. “In South Africa I go out there in a play of mine and I’m talking to my brother about family matters, you know? In the last 10 years or so that audience has become more and more a mixed, true South African audience. It’s a very complex experience. It’s not as simple as it is for me here in America.”

As for the decision to direct his own work, he said, “Let’s face it, a lot of theater directors don’t like playwrights. You know [mimicking a director], ‘Christ, I just wish they’d shut up and not tell us how to do their damn plays.’ That’s why I direct my own.”

The six-week run of “Valley Song” will offer Fugard his first stay of any length in Los Angeles. He has a “base camp” an hour north of New York City that he has used whenever he is in the country. “But I’ve never really got to know L.A.,” he said. Proof that he was telling the truth came when he made this observation: “I can’t help always seeing the consequences of a certain glibness in the work of people who have been immersed in film and come back to the theater.”

A theater man is conspicuous in Hollywood at Oscar season.

“I’m very conscious of the extraordinary thing that film can do,” he said. “But it would never be my passion.”

Two of his 20-odd plays have been turned into movies (“The Road to Mecca” and “Boesman and Lena”), but he disavows them. “I don’t think my plays translate,” he said. “I actively discourage it when my agent brings it up. I’m 65 and more passionately in love with my craft than I’ve ever been, but I’m also aware that the energy curve is going down now. There are a lot of stories I’ve got to tell if I want to die a reasonably happy man, released of some of the baggage I carry with me. So I can do without complications, and film at this point in my life would be a huge complication.”

Fourteen years ago, Fugard acknowledged that he was an alcoholic and gave up drinking altogether. Does he believe he has become a better writer for it? Or not?

“I wish I knew,” he said, “because if it isn’t better, I’d start drinking tomorrow. I mean, this is a dilemma I live with every day as I’ve tried to remain sober. And I still don’t know whether I’m a better writer for it, a worse writer for it or just the same writer. After I stopped drinking, I wrote ‘The Road to Mecca,’ ‘A Place With the Pigs,’ ‘My Children! My Africa!,’ ‘Playland’ and now ‘Valley Song.’ So I can still put words down on paper.”

Though well aware of “the seductive power of films,” as he puts it, Fugard is not moved by the argument that theater has become increasingly marginal as an art form.

“I think the theater has always been an elitist medium,” he said. “But that is where it’s also the most powerful. When I think of audiences that come to my plays, that go to the theater in South Africa, we are talking about a very influential, decision-making minority in the society--good educations, positions of power, business leaders, the people who create the intellectual and emotional climate. That’s how theater exerts its influence.

“It wasn’t by preaching to thousands or hundreds of thousands that we prepared the way for the extraordinary changes that took place peacefully. And furthermore I think that theater’s penetration of the human psyche is a deeper one than film. In theater you’ve got to work. Film does it for you. You don’t have to exercise your imagination.”

As Fugard spoke, he realized he was sounding provocative and said that he didn’t mean to. He is not so naive as not to understand there is no shortage of people in Los Angeles who might beg to differ with him on this matter. And so be it. Despite what he said earlier about being a coarse colonial, he is, quite the contrary by today’s standards, much closer to what society once regarded as a gentleman--but a gentleman who still can’t help calling things the way he sees them. As if his plays themselves haven’t already made that abundantly clear.