A Searing Flame That Illuminates: Athol Fugard's Apartheid Drama

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 11, 2007

It starts with scattered sparks, grows into a small brush fire and before you know it, "My Children! My Africa!" is an all-out conflagration.

Fanned by gusts of talent -- those of a trio of supple actors, a sensitive director and the superlative South African playwright Athol Fugard -- the 1989 apartheid drama remains in this Studio Theatre revival a captivating snapshot of the ways in which a cruel policy lays waste to an oppressed people.

You would have thought the unraveling of apartheid might have a dulling effect on the power of Fugard, who was a kind of poet laureate of heartbreak during South Africa's bleakest hours. Although some of the playwright's works did radiate more urgency in parlous political times, the tensions in this play speak passionately to the tragedy of any age in which violent change comes at the expense of youth and promise.

Fugard has composed on this occasion a tale that shifts ground in surprising fashion; it's the likability of the people he portrays, and the skill with which he allows a bitter reality to slowly encroach on a sunny setup, that make the work all the more compelling. The deceptively straightforward story revolves around the friendship between two students, a white teenage girl and a young black man her age. They are brought together by a black teacher in the Eastern Cape of the early 1980s who still believes that revolution can occur peacefully -- by means, in fact, of his very own classroom.

But a liberal education is a dangerous concept in a society becoming more polarized by the minute. "My Children! My Africa!" is set, in a sense, smack dab in the middle of the chasm between the entrenched white minority and a black majority that is no longer willing merely to try to outlast a government's hated practices. The teacher, known as Mr. M and played with gobs of panache by James Brown-Orleans, has waited his entire career for a Bantu student to come along with the brains and leadership potential of Thami (the extraordinarily impassioned Yaegel T. Welch).

So when Isabel (a charming Veronica del Cerro) arrives from a privileged white high school for a barrier-breaking exercise -- an inter-school debate on, of all topics, whether women should be treated equally in education to men -- Mr. M sees an opening for broader collaboration. He arranges for Thami and Isabel to team up for a regional high school literary contest.

What an audience might think is being constructed is an adolescent romance in the "Romeo and Juliet" vein, reinforced in the notion that their fraternizing may upset the people around them. Soon, though, it becomes apparent that the turmoil Fugard is animated by has nothing to do with teenage love, but the generational rift between the increasingly radicalized Thami and the more hidebound Mr. M, whose proselytizing for a more orderly dismantling of apartheid strikes Thami as nothing short of racial betrayal. And puts Mr. M in mortal peril.

On a stage adorned only by cinder block and stone -- set designer Debra Booth's spartan rendering of Mr. M's classroom -- plays out the disintegration of Mr. M's authority and Thami's chances for advancement. Old ways are being discarded but, Fugard is asking, to be replaced by what? Isabel, sympathetic to both men and unable to help either, is an emissary from a world of white liberalism that no longer seems capable of serving any useful function.

It's to the immense credit of director Serge Seiden and the actors that Thami, Isabel and Mr. M always come across as true to their natures; del Cerro is especially convincing at conveying Isabel's assertiveness, her need to reach across the gap. The play builds movingly as bit by bit, Thami reveals the magnitude of his grievances, and we come to grasp ever more deeply why he and his peers see the institutions set up for them as roadblocks rather than springboards. And just as powerfully, we empathize with Mr. M's fealty to a principle, even if it has worn out its welcome.

When at last Mr. M and Thami are holed up in a classroom, a gang of brick-hurling rioters massing outside, the point is affectingly made clear that in disparate ways, both men have their backs against the wall. And though Fugard tends to rely a little too strenuously on longish monologues for the characters to define themselves, this deficit is mitigated by the impassioned cast.

As the title implies, "My Children! My Africa!" is a lamentation about the pain and the cost, both self-inflicted and imposed from outside, on those who had the most to gain in ending a benighted system -- and who lost the most in trying.