[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, PLAYWRIGHTWHO 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.]
