Word: fugard
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NOTEBOOKS 1960-1977 by Athol Fugard; Knopf 238 pages...
Shades of gray are hard to come by in South Africa. That beautiful, terrible land invariably tempts writers to reduce it to black-and-white terms, to find a moral in its every predicament, a sermon in its every scene. Playwright Athol Fugard, 51, has won international acclaim by resisting the impulse to moralize. Such dramas as "Master Harold" . . . and the Boys, Boesman and Lena and A Lesson from Aloes do not preach against the evils of apartheid; they give institutionalized racism a human face, sometimes stolid, sometimes collapsing in laughter, tears or rage...
Notebooks 1960-1977 records Fugard's private struggle to become a public artist and to grasp the paradoxes of his troubled land. "South Africa," he notes in 1963, "needs to be loved now, when it is at its ugliest, more than at any other time." Fugard expresses his own love by stubbornly remaining at home, and by using drama as a form of Gandhian nonviolent resistance. That commitment has inevitably entangled him in a series of controversies. When leading British dramatists persist in boycotting South Africa with their plays, Fugard vehemently contends in 1968 that it is better...
Though matters racial preoccupy the diarist, Notebooks also displays Fugard in relaxed moods: exalting the clean wind and open sea, excitedly reading Camus, Gogol and works of Zen. But the real strength of his personal record is its collection of stories overheard, incidents chanced upon, sorrows glimpsed by accident-the random scraps out of which Fugard fashioned his plays. As he listens to a vagrant's life story, accompanies a friend to court, watches two blacks carrying a wooden box through the night, Fugard registers and captures the keening images that are the very stuff of vibrant theater...
...sentence. Sam epitomizes Fugard's profound irony: Master Harold, insecure and ashamed of his situation, is pitied by his Black servant, who in turn, despite his position, retains pride and human dignity...