Atl Fugaard's play shows the value of all human life

In early 2010, I was sitting at a communal table at a coffee shop in Cape Town. It was Atl Fugaard, South Africa's most important playwright and a great succession of his country's apartheid past. There he drank a cup of coffee like a normal person.

I picked up courage, approached him, and declared something about my admiration for his writing. “Hall-O,” Fugaard said enthusiastically. “Would you like to join? Have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.”

One of the great things about Fugard who passed away on Saturday was that he was a normal person and an extraordinary person. He was surprisingly enthusiastic about the people and their possibilities, ready to see good in every situation, but not afraid to confront bad both in others and in himself. A famous scene from “Master Harold” and a young white protagonist spits out in the face of his black mentor, he confesses freely and is drawn out of his life.

As theater critic Frank Rich pointed out in his 1982 review of the New York Times play, Fugaard's technique was to reveal the moral command “dig deep into small, closely observed details” of his character's false life.

My first encounter with Fugard's work was in the early 1980s when I saw the production of the 1972 play “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.” It is a dark comic story about a man who assigns himself to a corpse, assuming another identity, to win the coveted passbook that South African authorities needed as permission to work.

It was an innate, painful shock to the soul. I grew up in apartheid in South Africa. I walked past, and knew about the police banging on the doors at night, the sleazy and mean ways black people were treated. But the humanity and warmth of Fugaard's writing, the complicated reality of his character, made the cruelty of South Africa's racist regime unbearable.

In 2010, Fugaard lived in San Diego, but returned to Cape Town and rehearsed the Fugaard theatre “The Train Driver,” named after the playwright by producer and philanthropist Eric Abraham.

To be a vibrant beacon in the South African art scene, Fugaard was located in District 6, a former mixed race area that had been declared “white only” neighborhoods in 1966 by the apartheid government.

“You're sitting on the laps of ghosts of people who couldn't be here,” Fugaard said opening night.

Fugard's plays are largely an attempt to witness an unknown life that has not been forgotten about those ghosts, a moral blindness and blinking vision of reality created by apartheid. His most famous works – “Bradknot,” “Bozeman and Lena,” “The Island,” “The Road to Mecca,” “Sizwe Bungee,” and “Master Harold,” mercilessly state the insidious way race determines relations in South Africa. But they are also deeply humane.

“Moral clarity – this lack of this in South Africa and indeed in the world – what he delivered was what he delivered,” Abraham wrote after the playwright's death last weekend. “He directed us a box containing our past and urged us to go through them to learn more about ourselves,” Fugaard understands, and Abraham states:

Fugard returned to South Africa shortly after the Fugard Theater opened, and first lived in the new Bethesda. He and his wife, Paula Foye, later moved to the university town of Stellenbosch. I have met and interviewed him several times over the years. He was sometimes intense, but always cheerful, unpretentious, humble.

When I told me he began writing when he saw himself as an outskirt artist without formal training or degree, and when he thought no one was worth putting South African stories on stage.

But by being resolutely local, Fugard transcended the details of one country. As Abraham pointed out, his plays show the value of all human life. “Drink a glass of wine,” Fugaard inevitably says at the end of the interview. I wish I had it.