[Two men who had profound effects on me passed away during
the past 30 days: Peter Elbow (1935-2025) was a teacher of English teachers and
a professor of English composition, and Athol Fugard (1932-2025) was an internationally renowned dramatist who wrote
some of the most meaningful, and I think significant plays of the second half
of the 20th century.]
“PETER ELBOW, 89, DIES;
DEVISED A NEW WAY TO TEACH WRITING CLASS”
by Michael S. Rosenwald
[I posted a tribute to writing teacher Peter Elbow on Rick On Theater on 12 March. I didn’t post the obituary that ran in Section
A (news) of the New York Times on 3 March 2025, so I’ll post it now,
with another death notice of someone who affected me greatly in his life, the playwright
Athol Fugard. (Elbow’s obit was published
online on 27 February 2025 as “Peter Elbow, Professor Who Transformed Freshman Comp,
Dies at 89.”
[After the notice of Elbow’s passing, I will have
something to say that refers to some comments I appended to my memorial post
last week, “Peter
Elbow and Freewriting.” I wanted to
make the reference to the source of those remarks, regarding my writing
students in New York University’s Expository Writing Program, but I didn’t
decide to do so until after I’d posted the memorial. If any readers find the comments below worthy,
I invite you to revisit last week’s post and reread the afterword.]
His struggles with
writer’s block led him to create a process that favored an expressive, personal
approach over rigid academic conventions that often stifled students.
Peter Elbow, an English
professor whose struggles with writer’s block led him to create a new way of
teaching freshman composition that emphasized free-writing exercises, personal
reflection and peer feedback over rigid academic conventions that often stifled
students, died on Feb. 6 in Seattle. He was 89.
His wife, Cami Pelz
Elbow, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a perforated intestine.
Professor Elbow,
who taught for many years at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, emerged as a towering, if somewhat divisive, figure in
college English departments with the publication of his book “Writing
Without Teachers” in 1973.
Poking his finger in the
eye of hidebound pedagogues, Professor Elbow contended that indoctrinating
freshmen to think and write in an inflexible, formulaic style — with the
teacher as the only audience member — inhibited creativity and confidence at a
key moment in their intellectual development.
Instead, he proposed a
more reflective and touchy-feely process, in which students engaged in
free-writing exercises without worrying about grammar or anything else. The
goal was to generate ideas and then solicit feedback from peers before shaping
those ingredients — Professor Elbow was fond of cooking metaphors — into a
wholesome meal.
“Writing is a process
that is two-sided,” he told The
New York Times in 1983. “On the one hand, a writer has to be creative and loose
and generate a lot of words. On the other hand, he has to be hard-nosed and
make sure that what he says makes sense. It helps to separate these two
requirements.”
Professor Elbow came to
his conclusions out of necessity.
“What got me interested
in writing,” he often said, “was being unable to write.”
While he originally
intended to become a professor of literature, he suffered a debilitating case
of writer’s block almost as soon as he arrived at Harvard in 1959 to study [Geoffrey]
Chaucer [English poet and author; ca. 1343-1400; best known for The Canterbury
Tales (written 1387-1400)] in pursuit of a doctorate. Late nights at his
typewriter turned into blurry mornings, with little to show on paper.
“I had a terrible time
getting my first-semester papers written at all, and they were graded
unsatisfactory,” he wrote in “Everyone Can Write” (2000). “I could have stayed if
I’d done well the next semester, but after only a few weeks I could see things
were getting worse rather than better. I quit before being kicked out.”
After landing odd jobs as
a census taker and a timer for students practicing for their college board
exams, he taught literature and interdisciplinary studies at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology [Cambridge] and then at Franconia College, an
experimental liberal arts school in [Franconia,] New Hampshire that folded in
1978.
The jobs were low-paying,
at the instructor level. But he was intellectually inspired by connecting
students to literature and decided to resume his doctoral studies, enrolling at
Brandeis University [Waltham, Massachusetts]. This time, he approached writing
as a distinct process that emphasized creativity, reflection and revision.
“I made myself a rule:
Every time a paper was due, I had to have a draft of the same length as the
paper done a week before,” he said in a 1992 interview with the academic
journal Writing
on the Edge [University of California, Davis]. “So then I knew I had a week
to play with it.”
As he was writing (or not
writing), he jotted notes to himself.
“If something happened
that struck me, I would write a note — sometimes just on a little scrap of
paper — and would slip these pieces of paper into a folder,” he said in the
interview. “Especially if I got stuck, I would take another piece of paper and
say, ‘You’re stuck on this damn paper, so write about why you got stuck.’”
The idea was just to get
his thoughts down.
“The free-writing
principle is the principle of juice, of letting go, of garbage, of finding
diamonds among the garbage: all the metaphors you can make about free writing,”
he told Writing on the Edge.
Professor Elbow finished
his dissertation on Chaucer and took up a series of teaching positions. But he
didn’t focus on writing full time until around 1981, the year he published “Writing With Power:
Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process,” which codified his ideas into
textbook form.
As he spoke at
conferences and published academic papers about his ideas, he found a
sympathetic audience — the scores of college instructors struggling to teach
freshman composition and get their students excited about writing. His book
sales soared, and today his methods are used in colleges across the country.
“It would be very hard to
overstate Peter’s influence on the field,” Joseph Harris, the author of “A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966,” said in
an interview. “He was instrumental in shifting the attention of teachers to
helping students generate new prose ideas — to go from nothing to something on
the page.”
Peter Henry Elbow was
born on April 14, 1935, in Manhattan, and grew up in Fairlawn, N.J., and on
Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. His father, C. William Elbow Jr., owned a
men’s clothing store. His mother, Helen Hillyer Platt, was an artist.
He attended Proctor Academy, a
boarding school in [Andover,] New Hampshire, where he formed a close
relationship with a teacher named Bob Fisher.
“We’d read [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky
[Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist; 1821-81],” Professor
Elbow recalled in the Writing on the Edge interview. “He would ask us to write
about deep things. I also remember writing a fairy tale. He loved ideas and he
took us seriously, inviting us to love ideas and to take deep dives into
profundity.”
Peter went to Williams
College [Williamstown, Massachusetts] because Mr. Fisher did.
His instructors there
weren’t impressed with his writing. One told him, “Mr. Elbow, you continue your
steady but far from headlong rise upward.” But he wasn’t dissuaded.
“I was eager to do well
and I worked hard at it — and by the end of my first year had begun to do so,”
he wrote in “Everyone Can Write.” “Indeed, I gradually found myself wanting to
enter their world and be like them — a college professor, not just a teacher. I
wanted to be a learned, ironic, tweedy, pipe-smoking professor of literature.”
He graduated in 1957 with
a bachelor’s degree in English literature and then earned a master’s at Oxford.
Professor Elbow taught at
the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., Wesleyan University [Middletown,
Connecticut] and Stony Brook University [State University of New York at Stony
Brook on Long Island] before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst in
1987. He retired in 2000, but continued writing about writing.
His first marriage ended
in divorce. He married Cami Campbell Pelz in 1972, and they moved to the
Seattle area in 2014.
In addition to his wife,
Professor Elbow is survived by their children, Abigail Lockwood Elbow and
Benjamin Child Elbow, and two granddaughters.
Professor Elbow wore
turtleneck sweaters and sport coats, just like the professors he once idolized.
At first, his students were a little confused by what he asked them to do.
“The first time I was
given a free-writing exercise, I didn’t know what to do with it,” one of his
students told The
Times in 1983. “There was a feeling that this can’t go on too long. But after
the first few times, the exercise began to make sense and writing became a
little bit easier.”
[At the end of my afterword to last week’s tribute to Peter Elbow on this blog, I got into the intellectual development of the students in
my Writing Workshop classes at NYU. I
was touching tangentially on another book from the Practicum on teaching
writing I was taking at the time, educational psychologist William Perry's Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. The book is the
write-up of a long study Perry conducted at Harvard, and it made an immense
impression on me.
[I was thinking of Intellectual and Ethical Development as I was writing the Elbow afterword,
and I found some journal entries I made regarding Perry's findings as they
related to the classes I was teaching.
(We had to keep a journal of the classes we were teaching while taking
the Practicum.) Observations I made in
the journal were prompted by Perry's study.
[William G. Perry, Jr. (1913-98), a student counselor
and educational psychologist at Harvard, conducted a longitudinal study of the
mental development of college students over a 15-year period during the 1950s
and 1960s. He published his findings,
which were influential in the field of student development, in Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the
College Years: A Scheme in 1970.
[Perry’s “Scheme,” as it’s usually labeled, outlines
how adolescents progress intellectually and ethically, moving from a dualistic
view of knowledge to a more relativistic and committed perspective. He identified nine developmental “positions,”
most of which occur in the college years.
(The positions are sequential, but Perry emphasized that development
isn’t linear, and individuals may move back and forth between positions and
some take longer than others to move from one to the next.)
[With respect to what I said about the responsiveness
of my writing students, I pegged most of them in Positions 1 (“Basic Dualism”:
holding the Assumption that all problems have one correct answer [e.g.:
absolutes]; Authorities [e.g.: teachers] know these answers and are responsible
for passing them on; Assumptions and Authorities aren’t questioned), Position 2
(“Multiplicity Pre-legitimate”: seeing deviations from absolutes; students may
perceive deviations not as failures of the Authority to know the answer, but as
a test for students to find the correct answer), and Position 3 (“Multiplicity
Subordinate”: accepting that deviations from absolutes exist, but only in areas
where the Authority hasn’t found the correct answer yet; trust in Authority is
not yet broken) in Perry’s Scheme.
[Positions 1 through 4 (“Multiplicity Correlate or
Relativism Subordinate”: Students recognize the legitimacy of the uncertainty
and fallibility of Authorities; or students learn to apply a qualitative
justification to match their reasoning to the Authority’s requirements.),
according to the Scheme, are in the category of Dualism, the view by students
of truth in absolute terms of Right and Wrong, and that they obtain that truth
from Authorities, such as teachers, clergy, political leaders, parents, or
other figures.
[In Multiplicity, a sort of bridge category, students
recognize that there are multiple perspectives and that authorities are
fallible. The goal, if you will, of the
progression, is Relativism, the category of Positions 5 through 9, in which
students recognize multiple, conflicting versions of truth representing valid
alternatives. (Because the required
Writing Workshop was for incoming undergrads, the vast majority of my students
were freshmen, 18-19 years old and fresh out of high school. I didn’t see many students who’d progressed
beyond Position 3, but I also didn’t have very many who remained at Position 1
for, as Perry observed, they wouldn’t be likely to last the first year.
[Not only did I see the validity of Perry’s conclusions
from his study in the responses of my students, but I also became more
conscious of how my responses to the students’ questions and observations might
strike them. I wrote in my journal:
I’m much more aware of the relativism inherent in my
answers to questions and in my assignments, etc. I see how troublesome this lack of easy
answers is for the class. What are they
thinking when I tell them there is no one answer to a question, or that I won’t
tell them what to do about a specific [writing] problem? All of a sudden I’m conscious of the
confusion they must be experiencing.
[Michael S. Rosenwald is a reporter and obituary writer
at the New York Times. He’s previously written about history, the
social sciences, and culture for the Washington Post and the Boston
Globe.]
* * * *
“ATHOL FUGARD, 92, PLAYWRIGHT
WHO SUBVERTED APARTHEID, DIES”
by Bruce Weber
[The
obituary of Athol Fugard, the esteemed South African playwright, was published
in the New York Times on 11 March
2025 in Section A (news). It was also published
online on 9 March 2025 as “Athol Fugard, 92, Playwright Who Exposed Torments of
Apartheid, Dies.” Alex Traub, who works on the Obituaries desk
at the Times, contributed reporting.]
In works like “Blood
Knot,” “Master Harold” and “The Island,” he laid bare the realities of racial
separatism [apartheid] in his homeland, South Africa.
Athol Fugard, the South
African playwright whose portrayals of intimate relationships burdened by
oppressive racial separatism exposed the cruel psychological torment of
apartheid to an international audience, died on Saturday night [8 March 2025] at
his home in Stellenbosch, a town near Cape Town. He was 92.
His wife, Paula Fourie,
said he died after a cardiac event.
Over a long and
productive career, Mr. Fugard (pronounced FEW-guard) was both repelled and
fueled by the bond he felt with his homeland. [My report on the 2012 Signature
Theatre revival of Blood Knot,
28 February 2012, includes a brief history of apartheid.]
For decades he was
considered subversive by the government; at times productions of his work, with
their integrated casts, were considered illegal, and his co-workers in the
theater were jailed. In 1967, after his early play “The Blood Knot” appeared on
British television [British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); 12 June 1967], his
passport was revoked, so that for several years he could not leave the country.
He eventually spent many
years abroad, including in the United States — he worked on productions of his
plays at Yale and taught at the University of California, San Diego — yet he
could never let himself leave South Africa for good. Even before apartheid was
officially revoked in 1994, he maintained a home near Port Elizabeth, the city
where he grew up, on the country’s southeastern coast.
“I think I actually need
the sustaining provocation of being in South Africa when I’m telling a South
Africa story,” Mr. Fugard said in an interview with The New Yorker in 1982 [Mel
Gussow, “Profiles:
Witness,” 12 December 1982].
Viscerally powerful for
audiences, their roles written with the muscle and idiosyncrasy that are candy
to actors, Mr. Fugard’s more than 30 plays were presented widely in the United
States and around the world. Six have appeared on Broadway [Sizwe Banzi Is
Dead and The Island (1974), A Lesson From Aloes (1980), “MASTER
HAROLD” . . . and the boys (1982; revived 2003), Blood Knot
(1985), The Road to Mecca (2012)], and in 2011, he received a Tony Award
for lifetime achievement. [The link is to my report on the 2016 revival of “Master
Harold” by the Signature Theatre Company.]
He was often thought of
as a political playwright, but politics only occasionally figured overtly in
his work, and if his plays sometimes functioned as agitprop, it was true as
well that the intense personal dramas he created resonated into the wider world.
“The situation in South
Africa is so highly politicized that the notion of South African stories
without political consequence or resonance is a contradiction in terms,” he
said in a 1990 interview with American Theatre magazine.
[The quoted article above isn’t an interview with Fugard, but an autobiographical
essay: Athol Fugard, “Scenes from a Censored Life,” American Theatre 7.8
(Nov. 1990): 30-35, 68-69; republished in Staff of American Theatre
magazine, eds., The American Theatre Reader: Essays and Conversations from
American Theatre Magazine (Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 111-17.]
In his first important
play, “The Blood Knot” (1961), now known simply as “Blood Knot” — in which two
Black brothers, one of whom can pass for white, reflect the disparate
possibilities of life irrevocably determined by skin color — Mr. Fugard
established his penchant for creating a dramatic crucible onstage: characters
circling one another, fencing, generating tension and pressure in circumstances
of privation, often in an enclosed space.
He followed “Blood Knot”
with, among other works, “Boesman
and Lena” (1968), in which a mixed race couple, homeless and adrift, are
reduced to expressions of primal need [the link is to the 2019 report on the Signature
Theatre revival]. Then came two plays created with the Black South African
actors John Kani [b. 1942] and Winston
Ntshona [1941-2018]: “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” (1972), about a worker who takes
on the identity of a dead man to qualify for a work permit, and “The Island”
(1973), about cellmates rehearsing to perform [Sophocles’] “Antigone” in front
of other prisoners on Robben Island, the notorious penal institution that held
Nelson Mandela [1918-2013].
Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona
won Tonys for their performances when the two plays were performed in repertory
on Broadway in 1974. They reprised their roles for New York audiences at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003 (“The Island”) and 2008 (“Sizwe”).
In “A Lesson From Aloes”
(1978), Mr. Fugard wrote about three former dissidents, two white and one
Black, and the costs of their activism. And in the painfully autobiographical
“‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys,” he examined the relationship between a
teenage white boy and the two Black men who work for his mother in a tea shop.
In none of these plays,
however, is apartheid the addressed subject. Rather, it is the saturating
reality of the plays, the societally sanctioned philosophy — like American
capitalism in Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] “Death of a Salesman” [1949] — that
informs the lives of the characters.
For them, Mr. Fugard
created an insular, circumscribed world, just as William Faulkner [1897-1962] did
for his characters with the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.
Mr. Fugard considered
Faulkner an influence.
“I was absolutely
fascinated by the fact that here was an American writer who w unashamedly
regional,” he said. “It was reading and responding to Faulkner that gave me my first
push toward the regional identity that I’ve stayed with ever since.”
Broadway-Bound
In 1982 [9-27 March],
“Master Harold” opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven [Connecticut],
the first of Mr. Fugard’s plays to have its premiere outside South Africa. With
Mr. Fugard directing Danny Glover [b. 1946], Zakes Mokae
[1934-2009] and Lonny Price [b. 1959], the play moved to Broadway for a
run of nearly a year [4 May 1982-26 February 1983 (344 regular performances)].
“Master Harold” included
one of theater history’s most memorable shocks. At the play’s climax, in a fit
of angry confusion, Hally [Price], the young white stand-in for the
playwright, spits in the face of Sam (played by Mr. Mokae), who has been
Hally’s fond friend and at times even a surrogate father. Gasp-inducing on the
stage, it was an episode drawn from real life, Mr. Fugard confessed [see following article].
In the play, Sam’s rebuke
to young Hally is quiet and agonizingly restrained, and his forgiveness is
shortly forthcoming. (Mr. Mokae won a Tony in the role.) Like some other Black
roles written by Mr. Fugard, those of the tea shop workers drew criticism: As a
white man, the argument went, he did not have sufficient standing to imagine
the world from the point of view of oppressed Black characters, and his work
was thus inauthentic and a mere salve for the guilt of liberal whites.
But the play had a
powerful effect on audiences wherever it played, including in South Africa, and
mainstream critics were largely in Mr. Fugard’s corner.
“There may be two or
three living playwrights in the world who can write as well as Athol
Fugard,” Frank
Rich wrote in The New York Times [“Stage: ‘Master Harold,’ Fugard’s
Drama on Origin of Hate,” 5 May 1982], “but I’m not sure any of them has
written a recent play that can match ‘Master Harold . . . and the Boys.’”
Harold Athol Lannigan
Fugard was born on June 11, 1932, in Middleburg, in a semiarid region of South
Africa known as the Karoo. His family moved to Port Elizabeth when he was 3.
His father, Harold, who had lost a leg in a childhood accident, was a pianist
who played in jazz bands. He eventually descended into alcoholism, but he also
influenced Athol intellectually.
“From early on there were
two things that filled my life — music and storytelling, both of them provoked
by my father,” Mr. Fugard said in a 1985 interview [Lloyd Richards, “Athol Fugard, The Art
of Theater No. 8” Paris Review Iss. 111 (Summer 1989)].
Young Athol was closer,
however, to his mother, Elizabeth Potgieter, who ran a boardinghouse and later
a tearoom and became the family’s primary breadwinner. The more liberal of his
parents, it was she who influenced him morally. He was 16 when apartheid was
declared the law of the land in 1948.
“Growing up in South
Africa was a complicated experience for me, for one very simple reason,” Mr.
Fugard told Interview magazine in 1990 [Jamaica Kincaid, “Athol Fugard,” Interview
20.8 (Aug. 1990): 62]. “I think at a fairly early age I became suspicious of
what the system was trying to do to me. I knew the way it was trying to pull
me. I became conscious of what attitudes it was trying to implant in me and
what prejudices it was trying to pass on to me.”
Athol and his sister
Glenda won ballroom dancing prizes together. (In “Master Harold,” it is the
Black characters who are the dancers.) He studied automobile mechanics in high
school and then philosophy at the University of Cape Town, where he preferred boxing
to theater as an extracurricular activity. He dropped out during his final year
[1953] to hitchhike through Africa.
Out of money in Port
Sudan [Republic of the Sudan] on the Red Sea, Mr. Fugard took a job on a
merchant ship and found himself, as the only white crewman, living closely with
men of a different race for the first time. He wrote an ultimately failed novel
on board the ship. But he returned to Port Elizabeth determined to be a writer
and found work in newspapers and radio.
He later moved to Cape
Town, and at a party one night in 1956 he met Sheila Meiring [born 1932 in
England; now also a writer of short stories and plays], an aspiring actress who would become his wife and spur his
interest in writing for the theater. They divorced in 2015.
Survivors include his
second wife, Ms. Fourie [m. 2015]; his daughter from his first marriage, Lisa
Fugard [actor and writer; b. 1961; resides in California]; two children from
his second marriage, Halle and Lanigan; and a grandson.
An ‘Ugly’ Experience
The Fugards moved to
Johannesburg in the late 1950s, and for three months Mr. Fugard took a job as a
clerk in a court that tried Black people for violations involving their
required identity cards, known as passbooks. The experience, which he recalled
as “just so awful and ugly,” found its way onto the stage in “Sizwe Banzi Is
Dead.”
Two of his earliest
plays, “No-Good Friday” [1958] and “Nongogo” [1959], were inspired by Mr.
Mokae, the actor, and others he met in Sophiatown, a Black township outside
Johannesburg, but they attracted little attention, and the family decided to
move to London. There, Mr. Fugard had several plays rejected and ended up cleaning
houses to make money. Then, in 1960, when white police officers in the South
African city of Sharpeville opened fire on Black protesters engaged in a
peaceful demonstration against the passbook laws, killing some 70 people, the
Fugards were moved to return home.
[During apartheid in South Africa, a township was a
historically under-developed, racially segregated urban area reserved for
non-white residents.]
Mr. Fugard wrote a novel,
“Tsotsi,” about the moral reclamation of a delinquent, that would be published
almost 20 years later [1980] and made into a 2005 movie, which won an Oscar for
best foreign language film. And he wrote “The Blood Knot,” a seven-scene series
of conversations between brothers — the dark-skinned Zachariah, a laborer who
has lived in a severely circumscribed universe, and the light-skinned Morris,
who has traveled about South Africa and elocutes with a far more elevated
perspective.
The crisis in the play
arises when Zach, encouraged by Morris, begins a correspondence with a female
pen pal who turns out to be white. It precipitates a bitter — and finally a
physical — confrontation in which the brothers are forced to accept the reality
that their bond dooms them to misery.
The play, in its original
four-hour version, was performed just once [3 September 1961], in an abandoned
factory in Johannesburg for an interracial, nonpaying audience of about 120,
including friends, journalists and critics. Directed by Mr. Fugard, he also
acted in it (as Morris) alongside Mr. Mokae, and it changed Mr. Fugard’s life.
(Mr. Mokae’s, too.)
Critics who wrote about
“The Blood Knot” recognized in its indigenous story the birth of a new kind of
South African theater. The play was soon substantially cut, and the two actors
presented it in towns across South Africa, sharing time onstage but often
unable to travel in the same train cars. When the tour was over, the government
passed legislation making it illegal for integrated casts to perform in front
of integrated audiences.
A British producer
brought “The Blood Knot” to London (where Mr. Fugard was replaced as both actor
and director) and the powerful critic Kenneth Tynan [1927-80] dismissed it. It
was first presented in the United States Off Broadway [Cricket Theatre on 2nd
Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village] in 1964, with J. D. Cannon [1922-2005] as
Morris and James Earl Jones [1931-2024; see “In
Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024)” (22, 25, and 28 September 2024)] as
Zach. Mr. Fugard and Mr. Mokae played their original roles in the Broadway
premiere in 1986. Today, it has a confirmed place in the contemporary dramatic
canon.
[The United Kingdom première of The Blood Knot, produced by Michael White (1936-2016) was on 20 February 1963 at the New Arts Theatre, Hempstead. Zakes Mokae, having come to England to studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, reprised his role of Zachariah while Fugard was replaced on stage as Morris by Ian Bannen (Scottish; 1928-99); the London director was a blacklisted American film director, John Berry (1917-99), who had moved, with his family, to France.
[The review by Kenneth Tynan to which Bruce Weber refers above was published in the Weekend Observer on 24 February 1963. The review-writer, who wasn’t alone in his unfavorable appraisal, wrote in part:
At regular intervals throughout Athol Fugard’s The blood knot [sic] an alarm clock rings, summonsing the actors to food or bed. Its jangle may also be welcome to members of the audience who may find themselves, as I intermittently did, sunk in embarrassed sleep . . . . To some extent, I suppose, the piece reflects the guilt that a white South African feels about the Bantu; but to people who would not be horrified if their daughter married a Negro, it seems drably unadventurous, and at times – in the attitude of bemused benevolence towards the childish coloureds – unconsciously illiberal (quoted in Rory Riordan, “Athol Fugard and the Serpent Players: The Port Elizabeth years,” LitNet [website] 6 Nov. 2024).
(In South Africa during the apartheid era, ‘Bantu’ was a common, and at times official way of referring to black South Africans, now considered a dated and offensive ethnic slur. The present South African government has replaced ‘Bantu’ with Black due to the word’s former derogatory connotations.)
[The play was revived in London in 1966 by the Ijinle Theatre Company, a short-lived theater troupe co-founded by Fugard to produce African plays. (The Blood Knot was staged with The Trials of Brother Jero by Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright and poet and winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature born in 1934.) This is the production that was filmed for broadcast by the BBC the next year. Another revival came in 1971 from Frank Cousins’s (Jamaican; b. 1940) Dark and Light Theatre, the U.K.’s first black-led theater company. The Blood Knot was the theater’s inaugural production.]
“It’s a great work,” The
New Yorker critic Hilton Als wrote in 2012 [“Blood Brothers,” 19
February 2012], “so powerful that it’s almost clumsy at times, reminiscent of
Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Double’ [1846] in its intellectually crowded, poetic
examination of the doppelgänger.”
The notoriety of “The
Blood Knot” in South Africa inspired a group of Black men from the township
within Port Elizabeth to approach Mr. Fugard about helping them to create
theater.
Together they formed the
Serpent Players, a productive and politically defiant company that performed
classics by [Niccolò] Machiavelli [1469-1527; Florentine diplomat, author, dramatist,
philosopher, and historian], [Bertolt] Brecht [1898-1956; German theater director,
playwright, and poet] and others. During a production of “Antigone,” two of the
company’s actors were arrested and sent to Robben Island, where one of the
actors put on his own version of the play; it was a series of circumstances
that Mr. Fugard used in creating “The Island,” with Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona.
Going Underground
In 1967, with
international performances of “The Blood Knot” enhancing Mr. Fugard’s profile,
and the growing reputation within South Africa of the subversive productions of
the Serpent Players, the government seized Mr. Fugard’s passport, essentially
giving him a choice: stay in the country or leave and never come back. He
stayed, entering into a period of collaborative work that included “Sizwe
Banzi,” a play, first produced in 1972, that, as Mr. Fugard recalled in 1989,
“was far too dangerous for us to go public with it.”
“So we launched the play
by underground performances to which people had to have a specific invitation —
a legal loophole in the censorship structure in South Africa, and one we
continued to exploit for many years,” he said. “During our underground period,
we had a lot of police interference. They rolled up once or twice and
threatened to close us down, arrest us — the usual bully tactics of security
police anywhere in the world. We just persisted, carried on, and survived it.”
Mr. Fugard’s later plays
included “The Road to Mecca” (1984), about an artist ostracized in her South
African town because of her iconoclastic sculptures — “a metaphorical kind of
apartheid, one that treats creativity and individualism as something eccentric,
if not abhorrent,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote
in The Times [“‘To Mecca’ at Spoleto Festival,” 26 May 1987].
In “Playland” (1993), a
drama about the nature of repentance, he wrote in almost allegorical terms
about apartheid as it was being dismantled. The play depicts a confrontation
between a Black night watchman at an amusement park who is burdened by a tragic
memory, and a white park patron who draws the past into the open. And in “The
Train Driver” (2010) [the link is to the 2012 report on the Signature
Theatre revival], Mr. Fugard represented apartheid’s lingering torment in the
story of a white train engineer driven to sleepless misery by the memory of the
Black woman and child he had accidentally run down and killed.
Guilt, both his own and
other people’s, provided a powerful and painful strain in Mr. Fugard’s work. In
1984, he published “Notebooks 1960-1977,” a collection of journal entries, none
more revealing than the recollection of a childhood encounter with the Black
man who was his friend and mentor that became the most famous scene in his best
known play:
“Can’t remember what
precipitated it, but one day there was a rare quarrel between Sam and myself,”
he wrote. “In a truculent silence we closed the cafe, Sam set off home to New
Brighton [a township and suburb of Port Elizabeth] on foot and I followed a few
minutes later on my bike. I saw him walking ahead of me and, coming out of a
spasm of acute loneliness, as I rode up behind him I called his name, he turned
in mid-stride to look back and, as I cycled past, I spat in his face.
“Don’t suppose I will
ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that.”
[I’ve seen, I think, seven of Athol Fugard’s plays: The Island (2003), Blood Knot (2012), My
Children! My Africa! (2012), The
Train Driver (2012), The
Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (2015), “Master Harold” . . . and
the boys (2016), and Boesman and Lena (2019). (The links are to my reports on this
blog. The production of The Island
predates Rick On Theater, so there’s no report, unfortunately; the other
three plays were mentioned above and have embedded links there.)
[I’ve dubbed Fugard “one of the most interesting
playwrights of the second half of the 20th century.” He may have had one principal subject—apartheid—but each of his plays has something
significant to say and he’s said it in different ways and in different styles throughout
his life. (When I said this to my frequent
theater companion, she asked me what American playwright I’d say was Fugard’s
counterpart. I couldn’t think of one.)
[More than just “interesting,” Fugard’s plays were important,
even vital in my opinion. I put him at
the forefront of a small group of dramatists in the late 20th century whose works
were eye-opening and world-changing: Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema (South African; 1955
2023), Vaclav Havel (Czech; 1936-2011), and Janusz Glowacki (Polish; 1938-2017).
The world learned more about conditions
in apartheid South Africa or communist Eastern Europe from the plays of Fugard,
Ngema, Havel, and Glowacki than all the essays, news reports, and lectures
combined, I believe—at least we learned it more pointedly and more earnestly.
[Bruce Weber retired in 2016 after 27 years at the
New York Times. During the last eight he was an obituary
writer. Weber was also an articles editor for the Sunday magazine, a metro
reporter, a national arts correspondent, and a theater reviewer. Prior to his work at the Times, he was
a fiction editor at Esquire magazine.
[Weber is the editor of the collection, Look Who's Talking: An Anthology of Voices in the
Modern American Short Story (1989), and the author of three books: Savion!
My Life in Tap (2000), with the dancer Savion Glover; As They See 'Em: A
Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (2009), and Life Is a Wheel: Love,
Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America (2015). He’s at work on a biography of the novelist E.
L. Doctorow.]
* * * *
“HE SAW VALUE IN EVERY HUMAN LIFE”
by Roslyn Sulcas
[This article on the South African dramatist’s work ran
in the New York Times on 12 March
2025 in Section C (“Arts”). On 11 March,
it was posted in the paper’s website under the headline “Athol Fugard’s Plays Illustrated the Value of Every
Human Life.”]
“Sizwe Banzi Is Dead”
and other works bear witness to forgotten lives and to the moral blindness and
blinkered vision of the realities of apartheid South Africa.
In early 2010, I was
sitting at a communal table in a coffee shop in Cape Town, when I spotted a
grizzled, bearded fellow who looked strangely familiar. It was Athol Fugard,
South Africa’s foremost playwright and the great chronicler of his country’s
apartheid past. There he was, sipping a cup of coffee like any ordinary person.
I plucked up courage and
approached him, murmuring something inarticulate about my admiration for his
writing. “Hall-O,” Fugard said enthusiastically. “Join us. Have a coffee. Or a
glass of wine.”
One of the great things
about Fugard, who died on Saturday [see his obituary above], was that he
was an ordinary person as well as an extraordinary one. He was wonderfully
enthusiastic about people and their potential, ready to see the good in every
situation, but also unafraid to confront the bad, both in others and himself.
The famous scene in “‘Master Harold’ . . . and the Boys,” in which the young
white protagonist spits in the face of his Black mentor, was, he freely
confessed, drawn from his own life [both recounted above].
As the theater critic
Frank Rich noted in a 1982 New York Times review of the play [link
above], Fugard’s technique was to uncover moral imperatives “by burrowing
deeply into the small, intimately observed details” of the fallible lives of
his characters.
My first encounter with
Fugard’s work was in the early 1980s, when I saw a production of his 1972
play “Sizwe
Banzi Is Dead” [Charles Isherwood, “In South Africa, This Dead Man Does
Tell Tales,” New York Times 11 Apr. 2008, Sec. E (“Weekend Arts”): 3] written
with Winston Ntshona and John Kani. It’s a bleakly comic tale of a man who
assumes another identity and assigns his own to a corpse, in order to gain the
coveted pass book [sic] that the South African authorities required as
permission to work.
It was a visceral,
painful jolt to the soul. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. I knew about
passbooks, about the police hammering on the door at night, about the
dehumanizing, demeaning way Black people were treated. But the humanity and
warmth of Fugard’s writing, the complex reality of his characters, made the
cruelty of South Africa’s racist regime an excruciating truth.
In 2010, Fugard was
living in San Diego, but had returned to Cape Town to rehearse a new
play, “The
Train Driver” [Charles Isherwood, “In Tortured Empathy, a Ghost Hovers,” New York Times
10 Sept. 2012, Sec. C (“The Arts”): 1], before its premiere at the
newly built Fugard Theater, which the producer and philanthropist Eric Abraham had named
after the playwright.
The Fugard, which was to
become a vibrant beacon on the South African arts scene, was located in
District Six, a formerly mixed-race area that was declared a “whites only”
neighborhood by the apartheid government in 1966. (The theater, where numerous
works by Fugard were seen over a decade, closed in
2020, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns.)
[The Fugard Theatre, also known as The Fugard, opened in February 2010.
It closed in March 2021 (according to its website [link above] and Wikipedia) and was
handed over to the District Six Museum by its founder Eric Abraham. The theater reopened in 2022 as the District Six Homecoming Centre, while the Fugard's
archive moved online.]
“You will be sitting in
the laps of the ghosts of the people who couldn’t be here,” Fugard said on
opening night.
Fugard’s plays are in
great part about those ghosts, an attempt to bear witness to forgotten and
unknown lives and to the moral blindness and blinkered vision of the reality
engendered and perpetuated by apartheid. His best-known works — “Blood
Knot,” “Boesman
and Lena,” “The
Island,” “The Road to Mecca,” “Sizwe Banzi,” “Master Harold” —
are mercilessly unsparing about the insidious way that race determines
relationships in apartheid South Africa. But they are also deeply humane.
“Moral clarity — in such
short supply in South Africa and indeed the world — was what he delivered,” Abraham wrote after the
playwright’s death last weekend. “He pointed us to the boxes containing our
past and urged us to rifle through them in order to learn more about
ourselves.” Fugard understood, Abraham continued, “that divisions can only be
overcome by a realization of a shared humanity, a palpable sense that we must
look after one another if we are to make it through an often cruel and
unforgiving world.”
Fugard moved back to
South Africa soon after the Fugard Theater opened, first living in New
Bethesda, where “The Road to Mecca,” about the outsider artist Helen Martins,
was set; later he and his wife, Paula Fourie, moved to the university town of
Stellenbosch. I met and interviewed him several times over the years; he was
sometimes intense, but always jovial, unpretentious, humble.
Once he told me that he
considered himself an outsider artist, without formal training or a degree,
starting to write at a time when no one thought it worthwhile to put a South
African story onstage.
But by being determinedly
local, Fugard transcended the specifics of one country. As Abraham noted, his
plays demonstrate the value of every human life. “Come over for a glass of
wine,” Fugard would inevitably say at the end of an interview. I wish I had.
[Roslyn Sulcas is a dance critic and culture
writer for the New York Times.
She was raised in Cape Town, South
Africa, and studied English literature at university, receiving post-graduate
degrees from the University of Cape Town and Paris Diderot University (now part of Paris Cité University).
While finishing her thesis, she lived in Paris, where she began
writing for the British quarterly
Dance Theatre Journal and became the Paris
correspondent for Dance & Dancers, Dance Magazine, and Dance
International as well as writing frequently for other publications. In 1996, she moved to New York and worked as
an editor at Saveur, Top Model, House &
Garden, and House Beautiful while continuing to write about
dance. She began to review dance
for the New York Times in 2005. In 2011, she moved to London. She writes about film, theater, and culture
news as well as about dance for the Times.]
