"Tennessee Williams' plays will not disappear from our theaters, our memories, or our feelings. Who in our time was ever more universally admired?"
Elia Kazan, Director of Williams' Pulitzer Prize winners, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
Among the enduring gifts that Tennessee Williams has left to the international stage is his passionate., most spiritual play, The Night Of The Iguana, which opens the Public Theater's new season on September 27.
Rich with Williams' unforgettable characters, unexpected jolts of humor, and lyrical imagery and language, Iguana was praised as a compassionate "cry from the heart" (Time magazine) when it opened on Broadway in 1961 with Bette Davis, Patrick O'Neal and Margaret Leighton.
Winner of Williams' fourth:New York Drama Critics Circle ,Award, Iguana followed his many other: suc~esses: The Glass Menagerie, A Street(jar Named Desire, Summer And Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird Of Youth.
Today Williams' work basks in a fascinating and far-reaching revival. A national tour of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, starring Kathleen Turner, visited Pittsburgh on its way to Broadway. And in the spirit of glasnost, Iguana was mounted last year in the Soviet Union, where it toured Siberia and played at Moscow's revered Maly Theater. Director Theodore Mann discovered Soviet actors, long deprived of freedom of religion, were "swept away by Williams' strong religious undertow moving them even to the point of tears."
For Williams, Iguana is an unusually "hopeful" play whose theme is "how to live beyond despair." No stranger himself to despair, Williams wrote mostly about his "soulmates" -outsiders and misfits, men and women apart from themselves and society. More universally, however, he believed that we are "all prisoners within our own skins, with the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude."
Vividly etched characters, like those found in Iguana, are pure Tennessee Williams. ''They're what I- like best about the man," says Claude Purdy, director of the Public's production. Purdy, who
has admired Williams since he was an acting student, directed last year's successful August Wilson plays, Fences and Joe Turner's Come And Gone at the Publi~.
"Iguana demands extraordinary actors," says the Public's Producing Director Bill Gardner, "and we have cast the best." Marco St. John, who starred at the Public Theater in Horton Foote's The Habitation Of Dragons, will be the tormented Shannon, a disgraced Episcopal minister. Helena Ruoti, a Public favorite who starred last season in Reckless and Burn This, will play the undaunted Hannah. And hotblooded Maxine will be played by Olivia Williams, the kind-hearted proprietress, Bertha Holly, in Joe Turner's Come And Gone.
In 1940 at i~c._;~ta Verde., a run-down hotel in the steamy jungles on the west coast of Mexico, a priest, painter and poet converge-seeking not only shelter, but refuge from themselves. The
on vacation," having committed several indiscretions. As a man in whom gentleness and savagery are delicately balanced, the world-weary minister is on the br~k of hysteria.
Continued on page 4.
Tennessee Williams' The Night Of The Iguana Opens September 27.
Three Public Theater favorites return in Iguana: Olivia Williams, Marco St. John and Helena Ruoti.
UR TOWN: AMERICAN MASTERPIECE
'Our Town has become not just an instant classic, but one to be classically revisited." Clive Barnes, New York Post, December, 1989.
he original 1938 Broadway production: Emily (Martha Scott) and eorge (John Craven) are married by the Stage Manager~turned-Reverend jFrank Craven).
A prize-winning play and an award, inning director will come together for he Public's second show of the season. - obert Allan Ackerman, who won an J hie for his staging of Thomas Babe's A ( rayer for My Daughter and an Outer Cr itics Circle Award for his direction of he Slab Boys with Kevin Bacon, will facet Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer PrizeNinning Our Town, running from November 15 through December 23.
Thornton Wilder penned his classic portl'ait of American life in 1938, and no play before or since has so captured the beauty of life, death and the lessons both each. A smash hit at its Broadway debut ver 50 years ago, Sidney Whipple of the ew York World Telegram wrote that it , va ' a beautiful and effective play, a imple and moving play, a play that deals 1 en tly with the philosophy of life after eatli and contains strong consolation in it spiritual promise. Our Town is a heatri ca l experience I would not like to ni s " Our Town is still a show not to be mi d bringing smiles and tears of JamiUarity in the 1990's. Wilder himself
once said, "Every 'masterpiece was written this morning;' and the affection with which millions of theatergoers have embraced his masterpiece proves its timelessness and its relevance.
Robert Allan Ackerman's most recent accomplishment has been his direction of John Malkovich in the hit London production of Burn This, which has been extended into November. As a resident director for the New York Shakespeare Festival he worked with such talents as Meryl Streep, Colleen Dewhurst, Richard Chamberlain, John Lithgow and Jason Robards. There he won his Obie for A Prayer For My Daught.er. On Broadway he has staged Bent with Richard Gere and John Byrne's The Slab Boys, which earned him the Outer Critics Circle Award. Off-Broadway he's directed Extremities with Susan Sarandon and Farrah Fawcett.
Mr. Ackerman first fell in love with Our Town when he saw the 1955 television version starring Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, then again when he played Dr. Gibbs in high school.
I. Wherever Our Town is lovingly and skillfully [)erformed, however many people see it, not one but many plays unfold Whatever your reaction, the 'you' who leaves the auditorium is not the same 'you' who entered it a few hours earlier. This is the magic, the meaning and the beating heart of the immortal theater."
Garson Kanin
Author of Born Yesterday and Adam's Rib New York Times, January 9, 1989
Despite his love for his "favorite play;' he's never before had the chance to direct what is "as close to being the Great American Play as we've got." He has a great respect for Our Town and calls the notion of contemporizing it a danger. "There will be no flashing headlines from today's papers in this production (because) the play speaks for itself. It is what one has a right to expect life to be." He admits that there is also the danger of being overly sentimental since Our Town is "so seductive one can fall very much in love with, the play." Mr. Ackerman sees an objective quality to Wilder's classic, one which "really wants you to look at life;' Our Town follows the lives of the people of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, in their living, their loving and their dying. Wilder's witty and warm depiction of the small moments of everyday life raises them from the mundane to the poetic. Ultimately, the play is a story of love and
beauty: the love between its two young innocents, George and Emily, the love of parent for child and brother for sister, the love in the tasks we perform each day ai:id one thing we so often forget to notice: the beauty in simply being alive.
Most recently revived on Broadway with Spalding Gray (Swimming To Cambodia), Eric Stoltz (Mask, Some Kind Of Wonderful), and Penelope Ann Miller (Biloxi Blues, The Freshman), Our Town once again found a place in the heart of its audience, calling for an extended run and win~ing the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival.
Mr. Ackerman is very excited to be working with such a personal play in the intimate space of the Public Theater. He sees it a,s both a challenge and a thrill to re-discover a play which has so much history for himself and for millions of performers and audiences everywhere.
50 years later, Penelope Ann Miller's Emily weds Eric Stoltz's George in the award-winning Lincoln Center Theater revival. Spalding Gray, as the Stage Manager, lcfolcs on.
Kym Helbig
Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint as the newlyweds in the 1955 NBC Television musical version of Our Town, in which Frank Sinatra sang "Love and Marriage."
16TH GREAT SEASON
By Tennessee Williams • Directed by-Claude Purdy
September 27-November 4
The most renewing and spiritual of Williams' plays, this passionate classic is directed by Claude Purdy, who staged the Public's hit productions of August Wilson ' s FENCES and JOE TURNER ' S COME AND GONE.
By Thornton Wilder
Directed by Robert Allan Ackerman
November 15-December 23
One of the lasting masterpieces to be written for the American theater, OUR TOWN is not just a classic , but one to be classically revisited. Moments of living, loving and dying-raised to the level of poetry-win audiences today as powerfully as ever.
PEED-T
By David Mamet • Directed by Mel Shapiro
January 3-February 10
The Pittsburgh premiere of Broadway's smash hit, "the wittiest and most fiendish comedy about American business since Mr. Mamet's own Pulitzer Prize-winning GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS." Mel Gussow, New York Times.
By Athol Fugard
February 21-March 31
Another Pittsburgh premiere: the latest play by the internationally acclaimed South African author of " MASTER HAROLD " and the boys , SIZWE BANSI IS DEAD and THE BLOOD KNOT. Fugard ' s fourth play at the Public " takes us by the hand and makes us part of the devastation that apartheid visits on three bright, funny, fascinating lives." Linda Winer, Newsday.
By Mel Shapiro
April 11-May 19
A world premiere! Award-winning playwright and director Mel Shapiro, who staged the Public's hit musical ELEANOR, takes a humorous and honest look at the lives of a college professor and his documentary-filmmaker wife as their 25-year marriage falters and both go into therapy.
By John Henry Redwood • Directed by Claude Purdy
May 30-July 7
Another world premiere! The star of August Wilson's FENCES returns to the Public as author of his own award-winning, poignant family drama. A couple struggles to stay together as they plan for the future of their mentally-handicapped son
TE SSEEWIL s
"The talent he had was complerely realized in plays that will not disappear from our theare-rs, our memories, or our feelings." Director Elia Kazan.
Continued from page 1.
Noisily, a captured iguana, tethered and fattened for a feast by the local natives, squirms under the hotel's veranda, in constant reminder of life's pain and impermanence.
Shannon finds solace in two strong women. Maxine Faulk, "bigger than life and twice as unnatural," is the hotel padrona. A lusty earth mother, she is freshly widowed and in no small hurry to fill her husband's shoes. Hannah • Jelkes is a saintly, frigid New England spinster who paints portraits of the travelers she meets while caring for her 97-year-old grandfather, "the world's oldest living poet."
Hannah, a woman of extraordinary endurance and tolerance, offers Shannon a chance to reach beyond their "separate cubicles." By words and compassion alone, together they make it through the lonely "dark night of the soul."
Director Claude Purdy chose Olivia Williams, a black actress, to play Maxine (a traditionally white role) because "her character is self-reliant and defiant, akin to a kind of expatriot black woman who has been true from the '20's on a kind of black woman who has wandered around the world, in the spirit of Eartha Kitt and Josephine Baker." "The ultimate objective is that ethnicity, gender or physical ability are not the final determinates in making casting choices," says Producing Director Bill Gardner. "We chose Olivia because she's an extraordinary actress."
Gardner presented another remarkable actress, Irene Worth, in a 1975 revival of Williams' Sweet Bird Of Youth in Chicago. Worth, who co-starred with Christopher Walken, won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Actress when the production, directed by Edwin Sherin, moved to Broadway. Gardner also presented A Streetcar Named Desire in Chicago in 1976 with Geraldine Page and Rip Torn. "Tennessee Williams made Geraldine Page's career," says Gardner. Page starred in the 1952 revival of Summer And Smoke at New York's Circle in the Square and in the 1961 film version with Laurence Harvey. She also starred in both the stage (1959) and film (1962) versions of Sweet Bird Of Youth with Paul Newman.
In 1947, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire launched the careers of Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando. Brando, an Actors Studio beginner, hitch-hiked from Manhattan to Williams' Provincetown beach bungalow to audition for the role of Stanley Kowalski. "He fixed the lights, and the plumbing, then sat down and read the part;' reports Tennessee Williams in his 1972 Memoirs. Iguana is the thinl Williams play staged by the Public, whose inaugural production in 1975 was The Glass Menagerie, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire in 1982. On February 25, 1983, Tennessee Williams died at 71, leaving his enduring gifts to us all.
Jeanne McNutt
MAMET'S HO LLYWOOD: SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS
"Speed-The-Plow is the wittiest and most fiendish comedy about American business since Mr. Mamet's own Glengarry Glen Ross." Mel Gussow, New York Times.
Hollywood is a city of seduction. The world is entranced by its speed, opulence, cars, stars, and the fantastic tales it weaves out of everyday lives.
David Mamet's brilliant dissection of La La Land's wheeler-dealers drives his uproarious Speed-The-Plow, a Pittsburgh premiere at the Public, January 3 to February 10.
"Riveting! By turns hilarious and chilling!" raved Frank Rich in The New York Times when Speed-The-Plow opened on Broadway in 1988. "Fiercely funny!"
echoed David Richards in The Washington Post. Mamet's smash hit brought the pop icon Madonna to the Broadway stage, and co-starred Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver, who won the
Tony Award for Best Actor.
Assuring Speed-The-Plow's appeal in Pittsburgh will be its critically acclaimed director, Mel Shapiro, who staged last season's hit, Eleanor. Shapiro's exciting and creative use of the Public's intimate space (Orphans, Hay Fever) has thrilled audiences and critics alike.
David Mamet has been a Pittsburgh favorite since the City Theatre's 1986 production of his Glengarry Glen Ross. A devastatingly funny expose of real estate schemers, Glengarry earned Mamet a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award nomination, and was named Best Play of 1983-84 by the New York Drama Critics Circle. Speed-The-Pww garnered three T~ny Award nominations, including Best Play. Mamet's other plays include A Life In The Theatre, and Obie Award winners, American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
Mamet has been just as successful in film. He wrote the screenplays for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1980) with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, the Oscar-nominated The Verdict with Paul Newman, The Untouchables with Robert DeNiro and Kevin Costner, and House Of Games starring his wife, Lindsay Crouse, and Joe Mantegna. It is from this world of film and learned cynicism that Mamet collected his material for Speed-The-Plow.
In the play, Charlie Fox and Bobby Gould Are old friends who started out in the mailroom together. Charlie is a struggling producer and Bobby has just been appointed head of production for a big movie studio. The new position gives Bobby the ability to "greenlight" one film project, assuring its being made. Charlie has a star-packaged film in his pocket but he must make a quick deal to hold the star. ff Bobby "greenlights" Charlie's film, their futures are assured, rolling in money. Nobody cares what the story is; it's all about making money. The movie is a "buddy film" with a big star. The catalyst for conflict enters the scene in the exceptional form of a temporary secretary, Karen. Neither of the men takes her too seriously, except for the serious desire to take her to bed. But Mamet weaves Karen into this story so seductively that it becomes an unforgettable evening in the theater, where loyalties and friendship ~re questioned and the art of the deal is master. Bob Hofmann
A Streetcar Named Desire at the Public in 1982 starred Stephen Lang (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Broadway's A Few Good Men) as Stanley Kowalski. ·--
The Glass Menagerie, the Public's inaugural production in 1975, with Steve Simpson as The Gentleman Caller and Amy Wright as Laura Wingfield.
Madonna, Joe Mantegna and Tony Award winner Ron Silver in Broadway's 1988 smash, Speed-The-Plow.
SHAPIRO'S NEW COMEDY
Award-winning director and playwright Mel Shapiro, who's worked with a Who's Who of actors and writers, scripts a Public Theater world premiere.
"As a director, I've worked with so many new plays and so many writers, I decided to put my mouth where my money was," says Mel Shapiro, author of The Lay Of The Land, a world premiere at the Public Theater from April 11 to May 19.
"I love writing," says Shapiro, who directed the hit musical Eleanor at the Public last season, "because while you are writing, the only people you deal with are the ones you imagine."
The Lay Of The Land examines the marriage of a middle-aged couple, both academics. The husband is having a blazing, obsessive affair with a student that puts his bid for tenure in jeopardy. The wife must grapple not only with her husband's infidelity, but with her entire lifestyle. The play is structured as parallel psychotherapy sessions: each character talking to his or her therapist. Occasionally the couple confr nts each other directly. The play is funny and poignant and at times moves into the absurd.
Like most new plays, The Lay Of The Lartd ha a long and fa cinating bi tory. OrigrnaUy Shapir wrote it fiv years ago as a musical using 12 ongs by Jer·ry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who countl hits include Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" and Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and ''Jailhouse Rock."
Later, the book and music divided into two separate pieces, and the collection of songs turned into a musical review directed by Billy Wilson. Shapiro
showed his script to a friend who said, "It's a play. I don't know why you need songs."
Shapiro rewrote the play and sent it to Linda Lavin, star of the television series Alice and Tony Award-winning Best Actress in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. Lavin liked the script and came to the Public Theater last March to do a reading of the play with actor Tom Atkins.
The Public's Producing Director Bill Gardner, who worked with Shapiro and Lavin in the 1974 world premiere of John Guare's Rich And Famous in Chicago, decided to add The Lay OfThe Land to his new season based on the success of the reading. Though neither the director nor the actors have been selected at this time, Shapiro reports "Linda (Lavin) would like to do the show if she is finished with her run of Gypsy on Broadway."
Perhaps the director might be tempted to direct his own play? Not Shapiro. ''A director is there to pressure you, provoke you, and kick you in the rear end. He makes you see things you don't want to see. When Lee Sankowich was directing my play Price of Admission in Los Angeles, I gave him three pieces of marvelous directorial advice. None of them worked and I begged him to take them out."
Many of Shapiro's glittering directorial accomplishments have been collaborations with 'writers or work on ne~ plays. He developed a musical version of Two
Gentlemen of Verona with John Guare and Galt MacDermot at the New York Shakespeare Festival that moved to Broadway and earned him a Tony for the Libretto and a Drama Desk Award and an Obie for Distinguished Directing. He staged Guare's Bosoms and Neglect at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago that also went to Broadway and garnered accolades and awards. The list of actors, writers and producers whom Shapiro has worked with reads like an American Theater Who's Who and includes Linda Lavin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Barnard Hughes, Cloris Leachman, Donald O'Connor, Michael Moriarty and Kate Reid.
Shapiro doesn't have a standard approach for working with new plays. "I've worked five times with John Guare and every time it's different." For the Public's Eleanor, ideas evolved over a series of meetings with its writers. Then Shapiro decided that the musical should start with the 1920 National Democratic Convention and the nomination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as vicepresident. That stage setting became a metaphor for the whole show. "I don't come in with an enormous approach or concept," says Shapiro. "Whai I'm really trying to create is a collaboration."
Shapiro started writing plays when he was a student at Carnegie Mellon, and returned to playwriting in 1982 with Long Marriages. Currently, he is working on a new murder mystery about the theater, The Sisters Karamazov.
Shapiro considers all work in the theater an intuitive process. "Television has a formula you have to adhere to," he says. "It is 23 minutes long, five acts with a commercial break between each and certain places where the jokes go." But a play shouldn't be created that way. As a result, one must feel one's way through theater. "If you knew the answers up front," he says, "then we'd be trying to make buttons rather than creating art."
Margaret Thomas Kelso
POWERffiTTING ACTOR DONS PLAYWRIGHT'S CAP
After collecting raves for his roles in August Wilson's plays, John Henry Redwood returns to the Public with his own poignant, award-winning world premiere.
Loved by Pittsburgh audiences for his winning portrayals of Troy Maxson in Fences and eth Holly in Joe Turner~ Come And Gone, actor John Henry Redwood returns to the Public this spring as playwright of his award-winning A Sunbeam which will run May 30 through July 7. Winner of the 1988 McDonald's Literary Achievement Award, A Sunbeam is a poignant drama about a husband and wife's struggle to stay together as they plan for the future of their mentally handicapped son.
Sol Gilchrist is an enormous man-child. He is 39 years old, black, mentally retarded and epileptic; he has been institutionalized in a mental health center for the past four years. Now, his mother, Celia, wants to bring him home to live. The problems that such a sensitive situation entails are many. The health and welfare of the handicapped individual are foremost on everyone's mind. But of no less importance are the effects on the rest of the family. Financial support is one concern. There is also the health of the aging parents and their ability to provide for the child in the man's body. And, of course, taking care of such a child will have tremendous effects on a marriage.
Playwright John Henry Redwood, the one-time University of Kansas football and basketball player, tackles these tough
issues head on. They are blended into a plot that takes some fascinating and surprising twists and turns. He tells a story of great love and devotion, sometimes tragic, sometimes poetically beautiful. Most important, he does so with great love for his characters. This love and faith in human nature allows Redwood to tell such a passionate story:
"The story is based on a childhood friend who was mentally retarded. He was a neighbor of mine with whom I spent a great deal of time. When I first met him his large frame was quite awesome and frightening to me. I was nowhere near his size or age. The loving innocence of this trusting oversized child drew me closer to him as time passed. His parents soon came to depend on me to protect him from the insensitive bullies that pervade all societies.
"Sol taught me to look past the obvious and seek the tenderness and kindness in people. He taught me to realize how helpless the helpless are in this society. I also learned through his parents how much people are willing to sacrifice for those they really love. Whenever I see a mother with a child that is 'abnormal; I hear Sol knocking at my door asking if I can come out to play; I remember seeing this big man sitting next to me among a class of seven-year-olds in Sunday School singing 'I'll Be A Sunbeam.'
"It's difficult to say where the actual
plot for this play originated. I do know that the world has 'Sols' that are victimized and ignored. Their stories are rarely told. Their parents' sorrows are never voiced."
Back to direct A Sunbeam is Claude Purdy, director of past heavyweight family dramas at the Public- Fences and Joe Turner's Come And Gone.
John Henry Redwood, who has recently been appearing on Broadway as Avery, the preacher in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, took the role of Troy Maxson to Atlanta's Alliance Theatre last winter where it played to sold-out houses during an extended run.
We are thrilled to welcome back Redwood. This is the man who, while developing his roles in the Public's Fences and Joe Turner (for which he was listed among the year's best performers by the Post-Gazette), had the time to work mornings at a North Side daycare center and spend several afternoons a week reading to patients at Divine Providence Hospital.
"I have made good friends with the people at the Public Theater. They treat me and my family with a respect that is rare in theater. I am also excited about having the play done in Pittsburgh because of the audience that the Public Theater attracts."
Rob Zellers
Mel Shapiro
Redwood as Troy Maxson in the
FUGARD'S FOURTH AT PPf: MY CIDLDREN! MY AFRICA!
'~thol Fugard's intimat.e play about enormous issues takes us by the hand and makes us part of the devastation that apartheid visits on three bright, funny, fascinating lives." Linda Winer, Newsday
The 1989 New York premiere of My Children! My Africa! featured Courtney B. Vance (Broadway's Fences) and the playwright's daughter, Lisa Fugard.
"This is my literary manifesto," Athol F ugard says of hi n ewe l play My Child re n! My Afri ca !, p eakin g with the same pass~on and eagerness in his voice that drive the play 's characters. ''If significant change is going to happen in South Africa, it's going to happen because President de Klerk and Nelson Mandela are going to talk to and listen to each other. In this, there is hope foi: a peaceful solution to the South African problem."
Marking the fourth play by Fugard to be presented by the Public, My Children! My Africa! receives its Pittsburgh p r e mi ere h e r e Fe b r u ar y 21 thro u gh Ma r ch 31. Fil-st produ ce d to o ve rflow audiences and powerful reviews at the Ma1·ke t Th e ater in Johann es burg, My Children! had similar e ffec t on critics and audiences when it was later p roduced in Port Eliz abeth and Cape Town and when it receive d its New York premiere in December, 1989. It opened at London's Royal National Theatre this fall.
Together with Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1976), The Blood Knot (1978), and the Tony, · Drama Desk and Drama Critics Circle Award-winning "MASTER HAROLD" and the boys (1986), this ea oil's p ro du c tion of My Ch i ldren! My Afr ica! will m a ke F u gard th mostproduced contemporary playwright in
the Public's 16-year history. "It's a testament to the significance and wide appeal of Fugard's work that his plays have been presented so often here and at theaters around the world," commented Pitt sburgh Public Theater's Producing Director Bill Gardner in announcing the 1990-91 season. "Even though he is writing about the enormous issue of apartheid, his plays work on a very human and intimate level , especially My Children!, and there is a very real oneon-one exchange between the characters and the audience."
Set in a South African "location," a term for the areas where blacks were resettled under the Group Areas Act of 1950 that strictly segregated living areas along racial boundaries, My Children! My Africa! is an impassioned indictment of the South African system of educating blacks. Grossly inferior to that of educating whites, Fugard calls the system, "the greatest social tragedy in South Africa today. Though, in recent years, the major universities have all decided to ignore government policy on exclusion of blacks and have opened their doors to those black students who are bright enough, there are very few black schools that provide students with an education that will ready them for university. It is an absolutely appalling
Athol Fugard directed the British premiere of My Children! My Africa!, which opened at London's Royal National Theatre in September. and critical situation that has got to be addressed and remedied immediately."
In the hands of Mr. M., an aging but passionately committed teacher, the black student in My Children! My Africa!, Thami, receives an all-toocomplete education on matters both distinctly South African and human. A passionate believer in the power and freedom of the English language, Mr. M. teams Thami up with Isabel, an equally bright student fr9m an all-white school, for an inter-school literary quiz. As these two young, intelligent and eager representatives of the future of South Africa peacefully and enchantingly connect over the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, a movement is brewing among Thami's schoolmates to boycott classes until authorities agree to sit down with them and negotiate a new, acceptable system of educating black South Africans. Suddenly caught between his loyalty to Mr. M., who disagrees with the boycott, his growing friendship with Isabel, and his fury at "a world that doesn't allow the majority of my people any dreams at all," Thamijoins the movement, severing his relationship with Isabel and jeopardizing both his and Mr. M's futures. "It's a cautionary tale about the enormous waste of apartheid;' says Fugard.
In reviewing the New York production of My Children! My Africa!, which starred Courtney B. Vance (who portrayed Cory in the Broadway production of August Wilson's Fences) as Thami, Clive Barnes of the New York Post wrote, "As I left the theater I found myself, ironically and almost irrelevantly, wondering what kind of society do I myself live in that can enable Mr. Vance, a g r a duate of both Harv ard and Yale, to 1 id e ntify himself so fi e r ce ly with the sins of apartheid. Attention must be paid to plays that provoke any such reaction."
"I've never had reactions to my work like I've had to this play," says Fugard, but the passionate responses to My Children! My Africa! are not surprising considering the gale-force of its characters' convictions and hopes. "I want American audiences to experience that it is not as simple as who's right and who's wrong. I want them to realize that Thami is right, Mr. M. is right, and Isabel is right , and yet something is very, very wrong." That is the engaging dilemma that makes My Children! My Africa! the type of play that draws audiences in and keeps them grasping on with the urgency and intensity of hanging off a cliff by the fingertips.
Elvira DiPaolo
Sizwe Bansi Is Dead at the Public in 1976 with Joe Seneca (Broadway's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) and Joe Morton (ABC's Equal Justice).
The Public's 1986 production of Fugard's award-winning "MASTER HAROLD" and the boys with William Jay and J. Mark Diamond.
Tennessee Williams
Directed· by Claude Purdy September 27-November 4
Directed by Robert Allan Ackerman November 15-December 23
Note: An alternate seating plan allows the North section (shaded area) to move, creating four-sided seating"theater in the round."
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Directed by Mel Shapiro January 3-February 10
John Henry Redwood
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