Stage:

...One of the most charming scenes in the play is a practice session in which Isabel and Thami attack one another with quotations from nineteenth-century poets...

...As Mr...

...Before his death, as he stands in the ruined school ringing the bell to call students who will not come, he recounts how, as a child, he discovered that words could create his image of Africa and how he devoted his life to finding someone who could receive those words from him and make the Africa he envisioned...

...Seats in the tiny theater were difficult to come by even though the critical reception was mixed...

...They are oddly asexual for young people that age-as is Mr...

...That practice is particularly in evidence in the new play because its organizing image is the formal debate, an academic ritual that has no force in a conflict in which words have lost their power to shape action, and because the three characters, for personal and racial reasons, are not allowed to touch...

...He tells Thami that he is an informer-and he may well be one-but surely the point about Mr...

...His characters tend to be representative figures, vehicles for often conflicting points of view (think of The Road to Mecca...

...It is all too good to be true-a cosmetic bandage on a deep wound-and the best-laid plans of Mr...

...For Thami, Mr...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Some thought the play too didactic...

...But the lessons are never as simple as they look on the surface...

...The school is burned and, despite Thami's attempt to save him, Mr...

...M's school...

...For Isabel, the experience at first is exhilarating, the discovery of a world that she has known only at a distance, glimpsed through conversations with servants...

...My Africa!, to the Perry Street Theatre for a limited run as 1989 turned into 1990...

...Such responses were more accurate as description than as criticism...

...but she has to learn that her own good will is too fragile to bridge the division between Thami and Mr...

...M evokes when he cries out, "My children...

...Vance, as Thami, did remarkable things with his body as the humor and exuberance with Isabel turned to sullen acquiescence with Mr...

...and Thami regrets that he could never admit his love for the BOOKS teacher...

...I use the words schoolgirl and schoolboy to describe Isabel and Thami-as Mr...

...M asks Isabel but tells Thami to take part in the contest...

...Yet, Mr...

...M is killed...

...Thami and Isabel give the final summations for their teams, and although the debate is taking place at the black school and the point of contention is the place of women in society, Isabel carries the day in a vote by the host audience...

...M wants to know that Thami is trying to save him for himself, not for the cause...

...Fugard is often didactic, his dramatic fables having a moral or political point to make...

...M. Until the explosion...

...M, the schoolmaster, would have-although they are eighteen, on the edge of adulthood...

...M is not really a villain...

...to the young men in the street, informing is a logical extension of working within the system...

...There is a scene in which the effervescent black schoolteacher (John Kani) in the enthusiasm of the moment almost embraces the white schoolgirl (Lisa Fugard, the playwright's daughter), but his hands barely brush her shoulders as he pulls back to a conventional distance...

...Idealist as crotchety school-marm as collaborator, Mr...

...M may, as Thami suggests, have chosen death...

...Whatever their political differences, Mr...

...As a director, which he was with My Children!, Fugard sometimes places his performers on stage in patterns that emphasize their attitudinal isolation...

...You can't always play the hero," John Kani told a New York Times interviewer (December 17,1989...

...to echo Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act...

...M-but Fugard clearly does not want My Children...

...The power of the play on stage is that what at first appears to be a clash of ideas becomes a painful presentation of three people inextricably bound together in a situation that keeps them apart...

...M, Thami is his best and brightest student, whose promise vindicates the years he has spent trying to teach in the poverty-stricken black school system...

...Thami, heading across the border to join the rebel forces, and Isabel, intent on achieving something that she has not yet defined, have become the hope for the African future that Mr...

...The ending may be a little too neat, tying up loose ends that are, in fact, still loose...

...some, too static, too burdened by set speeches often aimed directly at the audience...

...Need and regret give the actors something to work with for a moving finish, but they somewhat shift the focus of the play, even though from the beginning the personal elements could be glimpsed beneath the surface...

...He has other business at hand here...

...M collapse...

...But they have a way of slipping their ideational restraints, turning into characters too big for pigeonholes...

...It was Kani, Miss Fugard, and Courtney B. Vance, as the black schoolboy, who made this sometimes intractable material so moving on stage...

...You have to play the villain...

...M and his school are extensions of the oppressive white social structure...

...M. proposes to extend this happy state by entering the two young people as a team to represent their town in a countrywide contest on English literature...

...The play opens at the end of a debate between a team from a white girls' school and one from Mr...

...They can be as amorphous as the South African situation is complex...

...The time is 1984 and the student boycotts that began so violently on the Cape peninsula in 1980 have reached the Eastern Cape Karoo town...

...M. For Mr...

...M hovers happily over the proceedings, the whole affair gives off a feeling of congeniality and interracial right reason...

...This is not only stated but presented dramatically as Mr...

...M is not what he has done but how he is perceived...