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Playwright Athol Fugard once knew a South African tea house just like the one in "Master Harold"...and the boys.
By Randy Gener
All Photos: Photofest
For Athol Fugard, a sort of nightly haunting occurs every time he sees a performance of "Master Harold"…and the boys. Every new staging is a return to the scene of his crime. "Watching the play is a rather painful journey down memory’s lane for me," he says. "I go back in time to that rainy day in the tea room in Port Elizabeth in 1950 when the three of us — Sam, Willie, and me — were there together and all of that happened."
But the acclaimed South African playwright doesn’t want to call Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of "Master Harold" a "revival." As the playwright himself will tell you, what is happening onstage with actors Danny Glover, Michael Boatman, and Christopher Denham, under the direction of Lonny Price, is "not a museum piece."
"Danny Glover will bring a completely different energy to the role of Sam," says Fugard from his American residence in New Mexico, referring to the part originally played by Tony winner Zakes Mokae. "And Lonny Price, who played the part of Master Harold on Broadway, will have his own personal vision of the play. Theatre is a living art." It is also, for Fugard, a strangely obsessive medium.
Fugard grew up under South Africa’s racially segregated system of apartheid (the Afrikaans words for separateness), established in 1948 when the Afrikaner National Party came to power. He finished writing the play in the early 1980s when apartheid still divided that country. The lyrical coming-of-age play premiered in 1982 at Yale Repertory Theatre. Fugard himself directed Danny Glover as Willie, Zakes Mokae as Sam, and Zeljko Ivanek as Hally. As he gained international prominence for his social-protest dramas (Blood Knot and A Lesson from Aloes) and theatrical collaborations with black artists (Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island), Fugard’s attacks on apartheid brought him into frequent conflict with the South African government.
That is why "Master Harold" was the first play to have its debut outside the author’s native land. It’s a fact that Fugard finds ironic. "If you were to look at my work during the apartheid years, "Master Harold" is the least political and the most personal of all my plays," he says. "The circumstances, the incidents that compelled me to write that play, actually happened to me when I was a school boy. It’s very, very autobiographical."
"If you were to look at my work during the apartheid years, "Master Harold" is the least political and the most personal of all my plays."
Set in Port Elizabeth, an industrial port on the Indian Ocean where many of Fugard’s works take place, the play concerns a young, white South African boy called Hally—the same nickname Fugard, born Athol Harold Lanigan Fugard in 1932, had in his youth—and his relationship to two black servants, the middle-aged Sam and the younger Willie, who were based on real people. Fugard’s mother was an Afrikaner, a South African of Dutch descent, who, though she could barely read or write, supported the family by successfully managing a tea room named, as in the play, St. George’s Park Tea Room. His father, the son of Irish-Huguenot immigrants from England, was an alcoholic and a cripple, who spent much of his time in bed spinning out yarns and instilling his son with racist attitudes.
As the play progresses, we learn of the distress and alienation Hally feels toward his father, and that the young boy has turned to the two servants for solace. He’s particularly dependent on Sam (based on Sam Semela who worked for Fugard’s mother at the tea room), who becomes a father-figure. Like the character in "Master Harold," Sam Semela was a ballroom dancer who once built Fugard a kite and engaged him in intellectual discussions.
Art imitates life. "Sam and Willie were these two beautiful black men who became my surrogate fathers in my youth," Fugard recalls. "My own father, who I loved very much, was a very weak man. A boy, at a certain point in his life, needs an image of a real man in his life. Two black men provided me with that image of manhood, which was a problem in South Africa because you were taught to think of black men as inferiors. That was the double bind, the problem that the play looks at."
The conundrum of an Afrikaner boy who cannot conceive of having a black father, not even as a surrogate, coupled with the terrible pressures Fugard felt as a teenager dealing with his parents’ problems, caused him to lash out at Sam. And just like in the play’s wrenching climax, the argument ends with Fugard spitting in Sam’s face.
It was an act that filled Fugard with a profound sense of shame. As he wrote in his journal (published as Notebooks: 1960-1977), "One day there was a rare quarrel between Sam and myself. In a truculent silence we closed the café. Sam set off home to New Brighton on foot, and I followed a few minutes later on my bike. I saw him walking ahead of me 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."
"If I had thought that it was all right to commit so ugly an act against another human being, I don’t think I would be talking to you today."
Though Sam ultimately forgave the young Fugard, that feeling of disgrace pricked the playwright’s conscience. "The shame that I felt was the thing that saved me," Fugard says. "If I had thought that it was all right to commit so ugly an act against another human being, I don’t think I would be talking to you today. One might almost say that what I did to Sam that afternoon opened my eyes to what was happening to me—to what society was doing to me—and it was the beginning of my journey out of the prejudices that characterized white South Africa."
"Master Harold" which is generally considered his best play, was spurred by an obsessive need to atone for what he did—to slay a restless ghost. "I suppose that was the longest time anyone of my plays had waited to be written," Fugard confesses. "All my plays, of course, have gone through long periods of gestation, something akin to a literary pregnancy, but the need to atone for what I did started much earlier than the actual writing of the play. I had made several attempts to write little scenarios about Sam and Willie, but none of it got off the ground. One day, when I suddenly put the image of myself next to that of Sam and Willie, I realized that all those previous attempts lacked a very important element—myself. The moment I saw myself in the same room with Sam and Willie, the play fell onto the page. Because of its intensely personal nature, because it involved such a strong shame factor, I really needed to grow well beyond it before I could turn around and look back at it."
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Like most memory plays, "Master Harold" is shot-through by intense feelings of unsentimental remorse and self-reflexive analysis. And because it looks back without anger at South Africa’s disgraceful past (apartheid officially ended in 1991), every new staging of the play reflects the human and moral toll that institutional racism exacts, whether in the United States or elsewhere.
"America is a very different world than South Africa, but there is also the racial question that continues to plague this country," he says. "One of the things that happened to me is that with the end of apartheid, my writing could no longer draw on the energy of protest. I had to, in a sense, reinvent myself, and I am still in the process of doing that. But there has been a certain understanding of my plays that have made them very relevant to Americans. And "Master Harold" is one clear example. Apartheid provides the context for the little boy in South Africa in the play but let’s not for one moment fool ourselves into thinking that America has solved its racial problems."
Fugard sometimes refers to "Master Harold" as "the portrait of an artist as a young fool," but he also considers it a kind of celebration. "I need to acknowledge the incredible importance of those two black men in my life—to celebrate them publicly," he says. "At the heart of the play is Sam’s extraordinary vision of ‘a world without collisions’—that makes the painful journey of the play all worthwhile. I so believe that theatre, in its own mysterious way, must celebrate life. We won’t sit through those dark experiences if we weren’t getting something very affirmative in them. That’s the magic of theatre."
Randy Gener is an associate editor of American Theatre magazine, and has written and directed his own plays, including Love Seats for Virginia Woolf.
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