Fugard addresses tragedies

Just before Christmas 2000, LaShanda Crozier pushed her two young daughters off a Los Angeles County Courthouse observation deck and then jumped after them. All three died.

Athol Fugard, the renowned South African playwright, read about the incident in The Times. About the same time, he read in a South African newspaper about Pumla Lolwana, a South African woman who killed herself and three children by plunging into the path of a train.

“The two stories are very similar in a number of disturbing ways,” Fugard says, “and I felt an obligation to make something of it as a writer.”

He tried to turn the stories into prose instead of a play. “But this one eluded me,” he says. “I couldn’t get it off the ground.”

The story of his failure, however, is indeed coming to a theater -- but in the form of a prose reading by Fugard himself, not a play. On Thursday at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, he will read from his own journals about his attempt to grapple with the women’s stories in prose. His reading is a benefit for the Fountain, which is currently presenting the premiere of his “Exits and Entrances.”

Fugard, who now lives part of each year in Del Mar, is no novice at appearing onstage in his own work. Angelenos saw him in his “Valley Song” in 1997 at the Mark Taper Forum.

He is certain that his account of his own struggle to write the women’s stories will eventually be published, perhaps in tandem with a fictional story about a relatively marginal character in one of the women’s stories. But he hopes the Fountain reading will help him “see if it holds an audience.”