Word: fugard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Athol Fugard...
...sometimes cherishes a surrogate father more than his own. But if the boy is white and the man is black, and the locale is South Africa in 1950, a day of reckoning is inevitable. No one knows this better than Athol Fugard, who has probed the corrosive effect of apartheid on his fellow South Africans in eight of his 16 plays, ranging from The Blood Knot to last season's award-winning A Lesson from Aloes. To each of his works, he brings a tormented conscience, a touch of the poet and a scalding honesty...
Only within the last ten years has guerrilla theater emerged from underground, Soyinka said, citing the examples of "Sizwe Banze is Dead", a recent Broadway hit, and "A Lesson from Aloes", written by the South African playwright, Athol Fugard...
...Fugard's latest drama concerns violated souls: three people who have been reduced to the bleak courage of despair. The aloe is a prickly outcast of a plant. Piet Bezuidenhout (Harris Yulin) sees in it the alchemy of survival. He is himself a spiny outcast, having been ostracized by his erstwhile comrades in the antiapartheid movement as a suspected informer...
Despite a trio of transcendent performances and occasional moments of mercurial passion, A Lesson from Aloes is curiously stillborn. Fugard relies far too relentlessly on talk, the inspissated venom of the impotent. It is as if his cha acters were constantly grappling fate at the tonsils, rather than grabbing it by the throat...