THEATER: Home Is Where the Art Is

Just before he flew to the U.S. to direct a splendid revival at Princeton this month of his favorite early play, Hello and Goodbye, dramatist Athol Fugard asked friends at a dinner party, "Am I about to become the new South Africa's first literary redundancy?" Although he tells the story with a twinkle, that fear has hovered over him for years. In his mind he is a poetic playwright, but the world has seen him as a political, even polemic one, and his works are valued more as testimony against apartheid than for their subtle interplay of emotion and Beckettian sensitivity...