Who Better to Teach Drama?

Once upon a time, a young man felt so trapped in a college classroom that he bolted and fled to the ends of the Earth.

Now, on a pleasant summery day nearly half a century later, Athol Fugard has returned to the bowers of academia and seems perfectly in his element.

Fugard (pronounced FEW-guard) is known foremost as a trenchant and eloquent voice of anti-racist white conscience during the bleakest, most intransigent years of the apartheid regime in his homeland of South Africa. At 67, the author of 31 plays including “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” and “A Lesson From Aloes” remains passionate about his writing. But Fugard has taken on an additional assignment--as an adjunct theater professor at UC San Diego.

During the spring quarter, Fugard’s duties brought him every Thursday morning to a small classroom at UC Irvine, where he and Marianne McDonald, a friend and colleague instrumental in his teaching appointment, engaged 11 doctoral candidates from the departments of classics and theater in discussions that catapulted through time and across continents. Their aim: to uncover the strands of meaning and dramatic method that link ancient Greek tragedy to the playwrights of contemporary Ireland and to Fugard’s own work.

On one such morning, Fugard listens silently through much of the three-hour seminar as McDonald and students pass the conversational baton in free-ranging discussions of Euripides’ tragedy “Hippolytus,” and Brian Friel’s “Living Quarters,” which reworks “Hippolytus” in a modern Irish setting.

During a break, student Michael Fox likens the shape of these sessions to a rock concert. “We [students] function as a warmup act. . . . Then Athol does his set. Then everyone comes on and plays together. We usually play one of Athol’s tunes.”

The tune today is “Dimetos,” one of Fugard’s more obscure plays--and one that contradicts the notion that he needs apartheid as thematic soil in which to grow involving stories.

Rather than playing a rock star gig, Fugard conducts his session like a trout fisherman patiently landing his catch. He gives the students plenty of line to swim where they will in his work’s currents. But eventually he reels the discussion in, responding to questions that have come up and telling how he built the play from a diverse range of experiences, both literary and mundane.

First Fugard reads a passage from the notebooks of Albert Camus that he says sparked his interest in Dimetos, a figure from ancient Greek literature who incestuously betrays a paternal obligation to his young niece. Then he outlines poet William Blake’s argument against a worldview grounded solely in the laws of Newtonian physics--a source for the science-versus-spirit theme at the core of “Dimetos.” The title character is an esteemed mechanical engineer who has gone into self-imposed exile in an unnamed countryside.

Finally, with the aplomb of a storyteller and an accomplished stage actor--both of which he is--Fugard tells of scenes from his daily life in South Africa that gave rise to key incidents and symbols in the 1975 play: a black youth climbing down a neighbor’s well to help save a horse that had fallen in; his daughter Lisa’s insistence that he rescue a family of frogs living in an abandoned well on their property in Port Elizabeth; and a stinking walrus carcass that washed up along a shore where he loved to walk, forcing him to hold his breath at a certain point in his daily stroll, lest he vomit.

It’s suggested that the niece’s suicide is an act of madness; Fugard is quizzical--”Where’s the madness?”--but lets the discussion go on before expounding his contradictory view. The group’s consensus is that Dimetos--played by Paul Scofield opposite Ben Kingsley in the 1976 London production--himself goes mad over his crime in the second act, but that he returns to sanity in a final act of transforming recognition that fits the pattern of the tragic hero.

“ ‘Transformation’ is a very important word in my vocabulary,” Fugard agrees. “The transformative potential in experience, and particularly in suffering.”

But he can’t help counting the cost of Dimetos’ road to transformation: “At the end there’s a redemptive quality, a journey to self-knowledge. A lot of people got wrecked in the process. So what price salvation?” Then he says it again, quietly--not for emphasis, but as if the issue remains alive and unsettled in his mind. “What price salvation?”

Though his comments pack authority in the literal sense of the word--this is, after all, the author speaking--there is no sense of edict in them. Fugard is a small, wiry man whose baggy gray slacks, scuffed athletic shoes and work shirt are at least as casual as the dress of his students. His craggy face could be imposing, with its deep-set eyes bottomed with careworn pockets. But those eyes sparkle, and the voice has a marvelous, gently musical lilt that one suspects could cast spells of enchantment if deployed in a children’s story-time circle rather than a high-powered graduate seminar.

In fact, enchantment has taken hold among the participants in Classics 200B: Greek Tragedy and Irish Fire, a course in a special inter-campus program shared by the UC branches in San Diego, Irvine and Riverside.

“He’s a sweet, sweet human being,” says theater student Beverly Redman. “There’s no ice to be broken. He’s completely disarming. Why be uncomfortable with such a nice person?”

Sarita Rainey, who today had the assignment of initiating the discussion of “Dimetos” with its author watching and listening from a distance of about six feet, says she and others feel free to argue interpretations that might not jibe with Fugard’s views of his work. They want the same leeway they enjoy when discussing any text, she says, and he gives it.

“He doesn’t lecture. He talks,” says Kate Booth, another student. “He says over and over again that he’s not really a teacher. But he’s a great teacher.”

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At 19, Fugard was near completion of a degree at the University of Cape Town that would have launched him toward a career as a professor of literature.

“I realized I was at the point of putting my foot in a trap,” he recalls after class, sharing sandwiches and fruit salad with McDonald, a student and an interviewer. “I hitchhiked up [the length of] Africa and then got on a boat”--a steamer that he worked on for two years, sailing the Far East and soaking up the experience an aspiring author needs.

Fugard’s first play was performed in 1955; by 1967 the apartheid regime considered him such a threat that it seized his passport in hopes of stifling his growing international career. The four-year travel ban did nothing to stop the progress of his works into the modern repertory.

McDonald, a professor of classics and theater at UCSD, was his conduit back to the classroom.

They met about 10 years ago through the La Jolla Playhouse, where McDonald was on the board of directors. They stayed in touch, and the bond intensified last summer when Fugard directed McDonald’s translation of “Antigone” in a student production in Ireland.

McDonald’s zeal for the classics goes back to kindergarten, when she began learning Latin from nuns at a convent school in Chicago. Money inherited from her father, a self-made tycoon who founded Zenith Electronics, put her in a unique position to advance her academic interest: In 1971, as a doctoral candidate at UC Irvine, she donated $1 million to launch a campus program to archive all Greek literature on computer.

The ongoing project has passed the classical period and is heading toward the Middle Ages, McDonald said, en route to modernity. She has since begun a parallel project to encode all Irish literature on computer--Ireland and things Irish being her parallel passion.

In Ireland, McDonald fused her literary obsessions in a series of lectures around the time of the “Antigone” production. She invited Fugard to join her at the lectern to comment on the strong female characters who populate his plays--a forceful, loving mother who supported the family and a disabled, distant, alcoholic father having provided the seedbed and paradigm for many of his plots.

Also last year, Fugard moved with his wife, Sheila, to Del Mar, abandoning New York City, which had been his base in the United States.

“I found the greed and scramble of [New York] something I didn’t need in my life anymore,” he says. He splits time between the United States and South Africa as his career requires; his newest play, “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” was written in Del Mar but is set in South Africa. Dealing with an exile’s return--and informed by a book of verse that ancient Roman poet Ovid wrote in exile--it will be produced at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre.

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Fugard’s appointment at UCSD began in January; he taught a graduate seminar in playwriting there, focusing on his own works, and joined McDonald for her Greek-Irish seminar in Irvine.

McDonald, who is working on a book-length critical study, “Time, Space and Silence: The Craft of Athol Fugard,” acknowledges that it was a stretch at times to relate a given Fugard play to the particular Greek tragedy up for discussion each week--although in “Dimetos” the thematic parallels with “Hippolytus” were uncanny.

Even so, Fugard says, it always makes sense to talk about his work in the shadow of the ancient Athenian masters: “You can’t write a play today without the work being haunted by the classics. We haven’t added one iota to what the Greeks discovered.”

Fugard’s other academic task was directing a student production of his 1969 play, “Boesman and Lena.” Next winter he plans to teach a course on autobiographical playwriting, focusing on Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, among others.

Walt Jones, chairman of the department of theater and dance at UCSD, says Fugard is obligated to teach only one 11-week course each year but can take on additional duties as he wishes.

At the end of the playwright’s three-year appointment, it will fall to Jones to do a written evaluation of his new staff member.

“It’s kind of humbling, actually. An evaluation of Athol Fugard? This appointment is as permanent as Athol wants it to be.”

“In no sense am I a teacher,” is Fugard’s own self-evaluation. “I have a certain experience which I enjoy sharing with young professionals. [The university] has been incredibly generous to me, allowing me to do what I want to do, trusting in my sense of responsibility to my students. It allows me to do this sort of thing without being trapped by it.” *