Athol Fugard sets play in new South Africa

NEW YORK, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Athol Fugard's many plays helped to build world antipathy to apartheid in his native South Africa, resulting in the end of white rule there. Now he has turned his attention for the first time to the brief era of black rule in that still uneasy nation.

The 69-year-old dramatist-actor-director, who now lives half of his time Del Mar, Calif., is back in New York with an oddly static new work, "Sorrows and Rejoicings," at the Off-Broadway Second Stage Theater. It centers on a South African white writer, Dawid Olivier, who has been forced into exile in London for his opposition to South Africa's minority white government and returns there after Nelson Mandela becomes the first black president in 1994.

The theme of the play, as described by Fugard in an interview, is "the tendency to ignore the contributions that other racial groups made to the struggle" for black supremacy. He admits that he has met with a certain amount of rejection in the new South Africa because "as a white man I have presumed to write and give voice to the black reality."

"And that is the question in this play -- is there anything in the past that is worth keeping?" he said. "And you know, speaking as a white man, I would like to say, 'Yes there is'."

When the curtain rises, Olivier has just died, and his story is told in retrospect by three women who have played pivotal roles in his life. Olivier, played by John Glover, makes an appearance in an extended flashback.

We learn that Olivier was unable to write in London and spent his 16 years there in an alcoholic haze. Realizing that he can only work in South Africa, he returns to his old home in the Karoo (the semi-desert where Fugard has) to find it maintained just as he left it by a black servant, Marta (Charlayne Woodard), his mistress and mother of his only child, Rebecca (Marci Harriel) who is now 18.

At his funeral, Marta, Rebecca, and Olivier's wife, Allison (Judith Light), who accompanied him to London, are reunited. Their conversations, which rehash old grievances and give rebirth to old regrets, summon Olivier's ghostly but very real presence so that he can present his side of the story.

He tells us his self-exile was intended to give him a chance to fight back against South Africa's discriminatory white government from a haven beyond censorship, and he recounts in detail how his dream gradually turned to disillusion. He quotes liberally from the Roman poet, Ovid, also a political exile who feared he would forget Latin living in a foreign land.

A poem by Ovid, "Sorrows," lends itself to the title Fugard has given his play. He has Olivier tell Allison, "The ink in my fountain pen has clotted and dried up like the blood in a dead man's veins ... God knows I've tried to get it flowing again, but if my writing ever had a heart it has stopped beating. I'm drought-stricken."

He returns to the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of the Karoo almost ecstatic, but death intervenes before he can begin writing again about the new South Africa he has discovered. We also learn that Olivier's mixed race daughter, who hates her father for his treatment of her mother, has burned his early writings, so that there is little left of his literary testament.

"If you think you and your new South Africa don't need it (Olivier's writings and the past in general), you're making a terrible mistake, "Marta tells her daughter. "You are going to need all the love you can get, no matter where it comes from."

Rebecca, who has inherited her father's house, says she doesn't want it or anything in it and derisively accuses her mother of a being locked into the old scheme of things, "looking after your dead Masters and Madams."

A long table made of native stinkwood takes on symbolic importance as the play progresses. It is where Olivier sat to write and to woo Marta, and Marta has polished its light and dark graining over the years to a rich sheen. At the end of the play, Olivier is seen kneeling on it with hands extended in supplication, possibly to Marta and Rebecca or possibly to the new South Africa.

Fugard has written a disturbing play and one that is not entirely satisfactory. Glover plays David Olivier as an aging hippy, bearded and with long stringy hair, wild-eyed and vocally strident. It's a high-pitched performance from the start that must maintain its urgency or loose its interest, and the difficulty in sustaining it is evident.

Woodard gives the most satisfactory performance, full of shadings and nuances that make Marta a real character trapped in a somewhat artificial drama. By contrast, Light as Allison seems like a caricature of a brittle woman shaped in the English mold, and Harriel as Rebecca is unrelentingly sullen and unattractive.

Fugard has directed his play with imagination but is unable to give it much life. Susan Hilferty's brownish set barely differentiates between the inside and the outside of the house and her costumes are matchingly drab. Dennis Parichy's lighting adds to the overall effect of gloom.

It is no surprise that his earlier plays were more challenging. So was the situation in South Africa.

One of his earliest plays, "Blood Knot" (1961) was the first to put a black person and a white person together on a South African stage. It was produced for stage and television in both London and New York and established him as a promising personality in the theater and a powerful voice in South Africa.

This promise was fulfilled in subsequent hit plays -- "Hello and Goodbye," "Boesman and Lena." "Sizwe Bansi is Dead," "A Lesson from Aloes," and "Master Harold ... & the Boys," all of which have entered the international theater repertory. He has always been criticized for a tendency to sacrifice character to symbolism, as he has in "Sorrows and Rejoicings," but he is still a voice worth listening to.