"Other Desert Cities' and "My Children! My Africa!'

I came of age in the 1960s, that turbulent time that dramatically affected so many of us. Several of my college contemporaries were involved with the radical Weatherman group after graduation. One was killed in an explosion while that group (an off-shoot of Students for a Democratic Society) was making bombs in Greenwich Village in 1970. Another was arrested and imprisoned for years.

At that time, I was teaching at Penn, and my students boycotted classes and joined the March to Washington to protest the war in Cambodia. One of my most vivid memories from that time is of a pair of bewildered, weeping parents (friends of my family), sitting in their living room in my home town. They had just heard the news that their son (a former high school classmate) had fled to Canada to escape the draft.

So for me, political protests will always trigger painful memories of generations in conflict and anguish.

Perhaps that's why two plays in New York this spring resonated so deeply with me. Both deal with protesters, and with issues between parents and children, teachers and students. The stakes are high, and the results are heartrending.

The teaching of brotherhood and humanity is what Athol Fugard's plays are about. (He follows in the footsteps of Brecht, who preached that "education is the noblest function of the theater.")

Unlearning hatred

Fugard's celebrated Master Harold and the Boys, for example, is a parable of how a white South African schoolboy learns hatred and cruelty"“ from his own father. It's a lesson that his family's loving servants (both black) can't help him unlearn.

Fugard tries to show us that we must keep trying (in the words of the "'60s singers Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young) to "teach our children well" and to love their fellow man. Otherwise the world will continue to suffer the consequences that plagued his country tragically for decades.

Fugard's My Children! My Africa enjoys a special place in his oeuvre because the play literally turns the theater into a classroom. In it, a black South African teacher named Mr. M. is determined to teach his students (and us) how to live together and understand one another, and thereby create change peacefully.

Toward that purpose, he creates a debating team of his two star students"“ one black (Thami) and one white (Isabel)"“ to compete in a regional literary tournament and thereby show what "winning" can mean in his country. But it's not the white student who has the problem learning this lesson"“ it's the black one.

Smelling danger

"Mr. M. is out of touch with what is happening with us blacks," Thami says about their teacher. While Mr. M. circles the audience— ringing the school bell, creating a classroom in the theater and lecturing to the audience on brotherhood— Thami grows disenchanted. "I sit behind my desk like an animal that smells danger," he says.

Thami has lost the patience to sit in the classroom any longer; he doesn't trust the educational process as the catalyst for change.

"We have found another classroom," he declares: "the streets!" So Thami leaves Mr. M.'s school"“ and the debating duo"“ to join a radical protest movement.

Soon Mr. M.'s students are all rebelling against their teacher. "Come to school before they kill all of you!" Mr. M. cries out desperately, circling the audience, frantically ringing the school bell. "What did I teach you? Put the problem into words!"

Timeless lesson

But Mr. M.'s passionate plea for "liberation through education" goes unheeded by Thami and the other rebel-students, who opt for violent protest instead. The police intervene, and the results are disastrous to all.

Ironically, it is the white student, Isabel, who has learned the lesson of Mr. M., her black teacher, and vows to teach it to others. "I am one of your children," she tells Mr. M.

Fugard wrote the play in 1984; ten years later, apartheid was abolished. Nelson Mandela founded a democracy in South Africa and became its first black president.

Even so, watching this tragic tale brings home Fugard's timeless lesson: that violent protest, no matter the outcome, is a choice wherein everyone suffers. And in the wake of so much tragic loss of life, how can we truly measure what has brought about the change"“ violence or education?

Reaganites in exile

Other Desert Cities, the family drama by Jon Robin Baitz that just completed an open-ended run on Broadway, also concerns the clash between generations, and the use of protest to express it. This story is set in contemporary Southern California, where Polly and Lyman Wyeth "“ archconservative Reagan/Bushites— have exiled themselves in the Palm Springs desert.

Their luxury home is a fortress, protecting them from the painful aftermath of a family tragedy. Years ago, we learn, their eldest son, Henry, was a radical Weatherman-style anti-war protester, who died soon after he was implicated in a bombing.

The play begins with the homecoming of the Wyeth's leftist daughter Brooke on Christmas Eve, 2004; she is there to open old family wounds. To the dismay of those gathered (her parents, younger brother Tripp and alcoholic Aunt Silda), Brooke announces that she has written a personal memoir.

In it, she reveals that her brother Henry's death was a suicide brought about by guilt and despair, and she blames her parents for having caused it through their political intransigence and lack of understanding. Brooke has suffered a nervous breakdown over Henry's death, and her parents perceive her book as a punishment"“ a vindictive "settling of the score" between generations tragically divided in their worldviews.

Ibsen-style revelation

In Act II, Baitz delivers a dramatic Ibsen-style revelation of an even deeper secret that causes a new seismic shift within the family. As in Fugard's play, no one is to blame for the outcome, and yet everyone plays a role, everyone is responsible, everyone suffers as a consequence.

Whether it's the Wyeth family in Baitz's play or the "family of man" in Fugard's play, everyone pays a price for discord between the generations, when gaps cannot be bridged and where violence is the ultimate outcome.

In the end, both of these powerful plays teach a hard lesson, and an enduring one: that sometimes political protest hurts the protesters more than it serves their cause.