Homeland defense: an exile's return.('Sorrows and Rejoicings')

"You and me. That is how it starts. The two factors in an equation which resolves out into either heaven or hell, and most likely both," the South African playwright Athol Fugard writes in the introduction to "Blood Knot" (1961), which was the first major play to put a black person and a white person together on his nation's stage. Over the past forty years, in a number of plays that have dared to breach South Africa's racial divide, Fugard has borne witness to the nameless and the destitute in his beautiful and barbarous corner of the world. His plays have done their work: they helped to build the consensus that dismantled apartheid and culminated, in 1994, with the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first black President. But with that shift in power has come a shift in taste. "There's definitely a tendency . . . to ignore the contributions that other racial groups made to the struggle," Fugard told the Times last year. "People are wanting to claim their own voices and the right to speak for themselves. So I think there's an impatience with me now." Fugard, who lives half the year in Southern California and the other half in the Karoo, finds himself asking, "Am I going to be South Africa's first literary redundancy?" His compelling "Sorrows and Rejoicings" (which he also directed, at the Second Stage) addresses this dilemma. Here, caught between his desire for social revolution and regret at his marginalization, the sixty-nine-year-old playwright adds his own testimony to South Africa's legacy of waste and violation.

"Sorrows and Rejoicings" tells the tale of a dying white poet, Dawid Olivier (John Glover), who has returned to his village after sixteen years of political exile in London to reconnect with his liberated homeland, and with his black mistress, Marta (Charlayne Woodard), and their light-skinned teen-age daughter, Rebecca (Marcy Harriell). When the curtain comes up, Dawid has just been buried. His widow, Allison (Judith Light), a white South African whose formal black suit suggests a demure, pragmatic nature, and Marta, in a loose-fitting patterned dress that hints at her graciousness of spirit, return to the Olivier family home and piece together their shared history with Dawid, who materializes as a projection of their memories.

The space between Allison and Marta is contained and civilized, a fact emphasized by the large, uncluttered stage. It is dominated by a door frame, whose threshold for most of the evening the Bolshie Rebecca resolutely refuses to cross, and by an oblong table made from the indigenous stinkwood tree. Marta -- whose sweetness and suffering are delicately conveyed by Woodard -- is the family maid, and her obsessive polishing of the table over the years has yielded a rich, textured mocha-and-blond veneer. For her, the table is alive with meaning. "It remembers those days," she says, speaking for the wood, "when its head was full of the songs of the birds and the chattering of monkeys, when big elephants rubbed up against it. And it also remembers him." The stinkwood table is where Dawid wrote his poetry and stood to declaim it, and where, by implication, he and Marta made love. The table, whose essential quality is its blend of light and dark hues, is Dawid's legacy (he passes it on to Rebecca, who may or may not accept it); it is also Marta's -- a totem of her oppression and of her joy -- and the focus of her arguments with her daughter. "Stinkwood Marta," Rebecca sneers, "looking after her dead Masters and Madams."

On the walls of the Olivier house, a wash of turbulent browns suggests the dramatic South African sky that presses down on the characters. In this unbounded setting, the inside is turned out, and the events in the room seem to merge with the land beyond. Landscape defines language as much as language defines landscape. (In America, for instance, both the tall talk of the nineteenth century and the hyperbole of our own time are attempts to use words to fill a vast and vague land.) "I feared I'd ...