Stage:

...she embodies her...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Gladys, who never believed deeply in the cause, was a primly raised English girl, enticed from her shell by Piet (a personal image of what Piet and Steve hoped to do politically), liberated into vulnerability...

...When the secret police read her private diaries, the violation shattered her, and she is only now out of the asylum, making tentative attempts at reconstructing her life...

...Her Gladys is so fully realized that one wants to turn away in the early scenes, unable or unwilling to deal with this disturbed woman, but she pulls us back - to herself, to the trio, to the pain of the situation and the power of the play...

...Gladys, becoming specific about the play's symbol, asks if the price of survival is ' 'thorns and bitterness.'' The play is about survival, but its images - Gladys's madness, the deaths equated with Steve's departure, even Piet's aloes - suggest what Fugard once said about The Blood Knot, that it was about "men who were going to try to live without hope, without appeal.'' That is not the way The Blood Knot affects me, but at the end of Aloes despair and pain do settle over the characters, the stage...

...Men of Alan Paton's generation once assumed that intelligence, right feeling, political action could build a bridge across apartheid, and Fugard, for all his dark sense of things, seemed to agree...

...FUGARD'S LESSON THE HOPE IS IN THE ART WHEN ATHOLFUGARD came to the end of the experiments in group play-writing of the late 1960s, early 1970s - the years that produced his most direct social/political statements (Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, The Island) - he wrote Dimetos, an odd and oddly fascinating play which still baffles me when I re-read it...

...She does not play the character...

...Piet and his wife Gladys live in isolation, shunned by their old comrades, most of whom think he informed on Steve-wrongly, the play implies...

...Ostensibly, that is true...

...Yet, when I hear Danilo describe the city as a place where "Crisis is obviously its permanent environment" and dismiss "Vision" ("A few old cranks and their young followers still keep that word alive...

...I have not seen her in recent years and, until I got to Aloes, I thought of her as the earnest and somewhat awkward actress who struggled not too successfully with that other troubled woman, Ruth Atkins in the McCarter produc tion of Beyond the Horizon...

...While he was (working on it he told an interviewer (London Sunday Times, April 7,1974) that for the first time he was writing a play "not about South Africa...

...If there is hope in the still living aloes,, the predominant picture is of the parched land...

...Harris Yulin's Piet is - properly, I think - an odd species of aloes, at once prickly and thornless...

...It is Maria Tucci's Gladys that is the revelation of this production...

...GERALD WEALESe play...

...After Steve tells with great warmth about a giant fish he and his father caught when he was a boy, he then similarly tears up the photograph that triggered the memory...

...The three characters in his new play have the strength, the vitality, the reality of Zach and Morrie in The Blood Knot, of Boesman and Lena in the play that bears their name, of the two prisoners in The Island...

...Dimetos is set in an unidentified country...

...Once there, broken by psychological torture - laughter not violence - he told the officials all that he knew, and has come to Piet, his Afrikander friend, either to find a fellow traitor or to receive forgiveness...

...In twin scenes, Fugard provides each of them an image of rejection which may be more gesture than resolution...

...Piet, who remembers being unable to speak at the grave of a dead child on his drought-ridden farm, can find no words for Steve's departure...

...A Lesson from Aloes, Fugard's most recent play, begins among those souvenirs...

...At the end, Gladys reveals that she has been unable to write in the new diary has given her, to begin life again, and asks to be taken back to the asylum...

...For Steve, the move to England may be necessary for the welfare of his family, but for him it is Gladys's blank diary...

...Piet, the one who has tried to hold onto the meaning in the old idealism, has escaped, retreated into the titular aloes, surrounding himself with species of this strange plant which manages to live under circumstances in which most plants die...

...He had earlier violated a banning order, an isolating punishment which among other things refused him permission to attend social gatherings, by going to a party of friends, one of whom exposed him to the police which led to his arrest and imprisonment...

...The three characters in Aloes are veterans of the struggles in a cause that-for two of them at least - has come to seem false, a kind of ideological self-delusion that made their idealism and their sense of community appear to be politically important...

...The real hope in A Lesson from Aloes lies in Fugard's art, not in his report on beleaguered idealism...

...The play offers an inevitable comparison between Gladys's diaries - her past - and Steve's belongings, which he describes as scattered on the floor of his house, impossible to pack for emigration - his past...

...James Earl Jones, that redoubtable craftsman, occasionally seems a little calculated in his creation of Steve, but the result is impressive all the same...

...Steve Daniels, a colored leader of the party, has just returned from prison and is about to leave the country for good, to move his family to England...

...The rest of us muddle along as best we can") and when I see Dimetos in his self-selected isolation, I cannot help thinking of South Africa, of a country that has defeated the hopes that liberal whites and their black allies once had...

...It is presumptuous for someone sitting in Philadelphia, looking through the muddied veil of journalism, to decide what is or is not possible in a country half a world away, but all the reports suggest a chasm dividing black and white so great that the best impulses of South African reformers seem almost like quaint souvenirs of another period...

...The betrayal within their own camp and the complacent power of the government have retroactively robbed their activities, their allegiances of meaning...

...But that was six years ago, and, if her Gladys is a proper gauge of the current state of her art, Tucci is an actress of great power...

...he has earlier told the story of how his father dwindled away when the government's policy of forced relocation took him from his home by the sea...

...When Gladys discovers that Piet still has the receipt for the impounded diaries, she makes him tear it into tiny pieces...