Athol Fugard Visits Fairfield Ludlowe High School
By: Gabrielle Sierra Dec. 02, 2009
In all of his years living and working in the United States, Athol Fugard had never set foot in an American high school until Monday.
Fascinated by the liveliness of the environment, the South African playwright walked into the well-appointed library of Fairfield Ludlowe High School and looked rapturously at a group of young people quietly studying and working on computers. He immediately joined a group of students and chatted amiably with them about what they were studying. Working on Advanced Placement Government, he was told. Another student was reading one of J.M. Coetzee's novels. He offered the students a word of advice. "Some of my best friends are books. Listen to an old man," he said, cautioning that Kindles weren't actually books.
Fugard, whose new play Have You Seen Us? world premieres at Long Wharf Theatre Wednesday and runs through Dec. 20, visited Amanda Parrish's junior English class at Fairfield Ludlowe High School Monday morning. "I regard myself primarily as a storyteller," Fugard told the class of about 20 students.
He spoke with students about his process of creating theatre. "I was lucky enough to discover early on that I've always loved language and what happens to language in people's mouths," he said.
In a five decade career of writing plays, Fugard found that it took some time to find his voice. His early works, those he described as "apprenticeship plays," often were larger in scope. It wasn't until The Blood Knot (19??) that he discovered his own personal way of telling a story, Fugard told the students. "In the way that some painters are comfortable with a large canvas ... I am comfortable writing and using the stage and the opportunity it gives me to tell stories with 4, 3, 2, or 1 character," Fugard said.
He also shared with students the genesis of his new play Have You Seen Us? It was a pair of real-life incidents that triggered the creation of lead character Henry Parsons, a recovering alcoholic dealing with the poison of prejudice inside of him. "Henry likens anti-Semitism to a monster inside of him ... this is a play about redemption," Fugard said.
One of the first images that sparked the creation of the play came while he was eating a turkey sandwich in a sandwich shop near his San Diego home. "Into that sandwich shop that day shuffled a very elderly couple, almost behaving as if they were lost and didn't know what to do there," Fugard recalled. "That haunted me, the two of them."
The second came at the end of a pleasant walk in beautiful, warm blue California weather along the railway line that connects San Diego to Los Angeles. "I felt good about the world I lived in. Wild flowers near the footpath, white beach, blue Pacific. Sky blue. Cloudless," he said.
Walking through a parking lot, he saw a Star of David carved into a parking space and an anti-Semitic slur scratched out next to it. "Wouldn't you just be shocked and disgusted by that? Seeing that destroyed all of the beauty of the walk I'd just had," he said. "There was no idea there. There was just the living vile reality of what was gouged in the parking bay ... that is how I work."
While Fugard is known for the deep morality of his work, he doesn't approach writing a play with the goal of sending a message. He works from the face of another person, delving into their own situations and perspective. "The message comes automatically ... I am interested in people in desperate situations. Desperation generates drama. If you find a desperate individual, you find a story of social consequence," he said.
He encouraged the students to keep a journal and constantly jot down thoughts, striking images and one's emotional state; he calls it finger exercises for writers. "There are as many ways to be a writer as there are people who want to be writers," he said. "There is no patent to the emergence of good writing."
Have You Seen Us? runs through December 20 on the Long Wharf Theatre Mainstage. For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit www.longwharf.org or call 203-787-4282.
ABOUT THE THEATRE
Long Wharf Theatre (Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director and Ray Cullom, Managing Director), entering its 45th season, is recognized as a leader in American theatre, producing fresh and imaginative revivals of classics and modern plays, rediscoveries of neglected works and a variety of world and American premieres. More than 30 Long Wharf productions have transferred virtually intact to Broadway or Off-Broadway, some of which include Durango by Julia Cho, the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Wit by Margaret Edson, The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer and The Gin Game by D.L. Coburn. The theatre is an incubator of new works, including last season's A Civil War Christmas by Paula Vogel and Coming Home by Athol Fugard. Long Wharf Theatre has received New York Drama Critics Awards, Obie Awards, the Margo Jefferson Award for Production of New Works, a Special Citation from the Outer Critics Circle and the Tony® Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.
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