My Children!
My Africa!

Previews - Thursday, Jan 15 through Sunday, Jan 18

Opening Night Gala - Tuesday, Jan 20 at 8:00 pm

Post-Show Q&As - After most performances (except Saturday evenings and Opening Night), MTC will continue its new tradition of hosting a Q&A with a member of MTC’s Artistic staff and members of the cast!

After Words - Sunday, Jan 18
After our Sunday Preview matinee in the Boyer Theatre, Margot Melcon, MTC’s Literary Manager/Dramaturg, will interview a TBA personality onstage.

Opening Night - Tuesday, Jan 20
The theatre’s most festive evening! Meet the cast and director at an informal post-show reception and enjoy a complimentary glass of Korbel champagne and yummies provided by Whole Foods.

Director's Night - Wednesdays, Jan 21 & Feb 4
Lively post-show conversations with the director and/or cast members on two Wednesday evenings.
Wine Tasting Series - Saturday, Jan 24
Complimentary pre-show tasting (beginning one hour prior to show) on a Saturday night featuring a different winery for each production. For My Children! My Africa! the wine tasting host is Cline Cellars. Tasting begins at 7pm.
Perspectives - Thu Matinee, Jan 29
Topical lecture one hour prior to the Thursday matinee. Our Perspectives Speaker will be Josh Costello, MTC's Artistic Director of Expanded Programs and Director of MY CHILDREN! MY AFRICA!

Happy Hour - Wednesday, Jan 28
All drinks half-off one hour before one of our Wednesday evening performances.

• His People, His South Africa
• Apartheid
• Playwright Athol Fugard

His People, His South Africa
by Margot Melcon

Athol Fugard is a playwright distinctly of his time. As a playwright and activist deeply identified with his homeland, he has adroitly reacted to historical events as they have unfolded. Fugard openly opposed the South African system of apartheid (an Afrikaans word literally meaning apart-ness or separate-ness) that segregated the population and imposed severe oppression on the majority black population by the minority white ruling population. Born white of English and Afrikaner parents and raised in the highly charged political landscape of South Africa during the most brutal years of apartheid, Fugard’s voice and actions called attention to injustices of unthinkable size and magnitude.

He began writing plays in 1956 and was the founder of several multiracial theater companies in South Africa through the 1960s, a political act itself in the highly segregated environment of his homeland. By writing about the people and situations he saw around him and telling individual stories, he was able to make clear the devastatingly personal toll apartheid was taking on his country.

Fugard has always found inspiration for his work in the turbulent daily life of his community. Many of the dozens of plays he wrote highlight characteristics of South Africa’s culture by illuminating the lives of the people rather than the political situation. Actor John Kani, a longtime collaborator of Fugard’s, has said, “He opens up situations that I take for granted. He writes about the people on the street corners, the simple ones, the no-name ones.”

For example, in Fugard’s Blood Knot (1961), two half-brothers live together in a one-room shack in Port Elizabeth, South Africa; one is a light-skinned man of mixed race who can pass for white, the other is black. In showing the difference between the everyday experiences of the two brothers, Fugard illustrated the differences in the lives of blacks and whites across all of South Africa.

In the semi-autobiographical play “Master Harold” . . . and the boys (1982), a white seventeen-year-old boy weilds power over two African servants whom he has known all his life, whom he is closer to than his own father. Entrenched in the institutionalized racism and bigotry of South Africa, the boy is unable to see his servants for the people they are.

In the early 1980s, Fugard read a brief newspaper item about a black schoolteacher caught up in the violent racial unrest very near the city where he lived. In a 1989 article in the New York Times, just before the world premiere of My Children! My Africa! at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa, he acknowledged this article as the starting point for this play. “Life serves me up appointments that I’ve got to keep, and if I don’t, my soul is in trouble,” Fugard explained. “That item just tapped me on the shoulder.” The play examines the developing friendship in a segregated small town between a white schoolgirl and a black schoolboy under the encouragement of his black teacher, and the interruption of the friendship during the racial violence that flared across South Africa in 1984.

The difference in the quality of education of the white and black students in South Africa is one of the most devastating legacies of apartheid. In 1953 with the passage of the Bantu Education Act, the education system in South Africa was brought under the control of the government and extended the offensively racist laws of apartheid into the schools, denying equal access to teachers, funding, and supplies by making government support of schools conditional on the acceptance of racially discriminatory curriculum. It was the reaction to the inequalities in education that led to the student boycotts and uprisings, contributing to the eventual overthrow of apartheid. In this play, the teacher and two students who are from vastly different backgrounds tell the story of hundreds of teachers and thousands of students who protested and struggled to bring about change.

The way Fugard has lived his life and the bravery of his work has changed and shaped his culture and called for attention around the world to be paid to the circumstances of the people of his homeland, people like the characters in his plays. He has participated in the revolution by using his talents as a playwright, sharing autobiographical moments as well as telling the small, personal stories of people around him, and has opened a window to the larger world of his people, his South Africa.

Apartheid

Apartheid was a social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by white minority governments in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group. Its crimes include murder, enslavement, deprivation of physical liberty, forced relocation, sexual violence, and collective persecution. The term apartheid (from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”) was coined in the 1930s, but the policy itself extends back to the beginning of white settlement in South Africa in 1652.

The implementation of apartheid policies, referred to as “separate development,” was first made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which put all South Africans into three racial categories: African (black), white, or Colored (of mixed race). The system of apartheid was then enforced by a series of laws including restriction on the already limited right of black Africans to own land; prohibition of most social contacts between the races; enforcement of the segregation of public facilities and the separation of educational standards; creation of race-specific job categories; restrictions on the powers of nonwhite unions; and the curbing of nonwhite participation in government.

Though the enforcement of apartheid was accompanied by tremendous suppression, continual resistance to apartheid existed within South Africa and included violence, strikes, demonstrations, and sabotage. As antiapartheid pressure also mounted outside South Africa, the South African government began to dismantle the apartheid system in the early 1990s. In 1994 the country’s constitution was rewritten and free general elections were held, With Nelson Mandela’s election as South Africa’s first black president, the last vestiges of the apartheid system were finally outlawed.

Athol Fugard Bio

Athol Fugard has been working in the theatre as a playwright, director and actor since the mid 1950s in South Africa, England and the United States. His plays include No-Good Friday, Nongogo, Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, People Are Living There, Boesman and Lena, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Dimetos, The Island, A Lesson from Aloes, “Master Harold”… and the boys, The Road to Mecca, A Place with the Pigs, My Children! My Africa!, Playland, Valley Song, The Captain’s Tiger, Sorrows and Rejoicings, Exits and Entrances, and his most recent play, Victory. He has been seen on stage in South Africa, in London, on and off Broadway in New York, and in regional theatre in the United States. Film credits include The Road to Mecca, Gandhi, The Killing Fields, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Marigolds in August, Boesman and Lena, and The Guest. He has written the novel Tsotsi, a film version of which was made in South Africa and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the Michael Powell Award and the Standard Life Audience Award at the 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival, the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, and the Audience Award at the Los Angeles AFI Film Festival. He has also published his Notebooks: 1960-1977 and the autobiographical memoirs Cousins.