Never have three friends been so at odds. Words bring them together. Actions tear them apart. Only the vestiges of love remain.
South Africa’s anti-apartheid rebellion is raging. Teacher Mr. M seeks a quiet, civilized war of words. His protégé and favorite pupil Thami is tired of Mr. M’s genteel “whispering.” He wants to learn to shout. Ingenuous Isabel just can’t find the sense in the senseless things going on around her and the anger between her two favorite people.
Rodgers and Hammerstein would find a way to tie a pretty bow around the turmoil, and someone would wash that conflict right out of their hair. Playwright Athol Fugard, however, chose to be brutally realistic in “My Children! My Africa!,” his tableau of the personal destruction often wreaked by the battle for equality. Fugard compels his audiences to respect the cause yet question the method and its toll.
ETSU is taking this democratic dichotomy – that 20 years later continues in not only South Africa, but other venues around the world – to the East Tennessee public Feb. 7-10 in ETSU’s Bud Frank Theatre. In March, the cast and crew will relocate the message to Bennington, Vt., for a week’s run.
“Fugard’s message could be bundled neatly into the notion that violence never solves anything, even fueled by the right cause,” says ETSU theatre professor Herbert Mark Parker, the production’s Mr. M. “Just like Mr. M, there were blacks in America who wanted to go slower, who mistrusted violence and lawlessness as a tool vs. a younger generation, such as the Black Panthers, whose motto was ‘by any means necessary .’
Parker’s thoughtful Mr. M is an “old-fashioned” and extraordinary black teacher in a South African township during the peak of anti-apartheid boycotts and rebellion. Thami, portrayed by ETSU theatre major Matthew Paessler, decides to stop learning in Mr. M’s traditional classroom and take his education to the streets. Caught in the middle, Rebekah Shibao as Isabel, hurts for both friends, yet is powerless in the struggle’s vortex.
“I’ve seen too much of it – wasted people, wasted chances,” says Mr. M, who wants to “fight the lunacy” with the intellectual, rather than the physical.
Isabel calls it the “dreaded unrest.” To Thami, it’s The Beginning. For Mr. M, it is an end.
While conflict roils on stage, the opposite is true behind the scenes.
“I love working with Herb,” says Shibao, a sophomore theatre transfer from University of Colorado. “It a great opportunity to work with him on a set . and working with Matt is great. I had a couple classes with him last semester and saw him in Cinderella last fall.”
For freshman Paessler, the comfort level of working with a friend also helps. “I love Rebekah,” he says. “I met her on the first day of school. The first day was scary. Everything was going wrong. I was all intimidated by the campus and she was in my second class of the day . I just can’t say enough nice things about her.”
Guest director Eric Peterson, artistic director of OldCastle Theatre Co. in Bennington, has nice things to say about all the actors and designers.
“They are just a joy to work with,” he says. “The young people are very enthusiastic, working hard, growing every day . and it’s the third time I’ve worked with Herb. He’s a marvelous actor and just a kind, generous human being.”
Appreciation also abounds for the playwright, born of an Afrikaner mother and Irish Roman Catholic father. “There’s something extraordinary about a playwright who is able to clearly express the thoughts and feelings of a young black African male, a young white South African female and an aging black teacher,” Peterson says. “That’s an extraordinary achievement .
“The play is so moving. I read it several times over the last several months, and flying down here, I read it between Albany and Cincinnati and I started crying on the plane. It still has an incredible power.”
The nice words, however, stop at the stage proscenium. There the battle begins.
“He’s got eyes and ears but he sees nothing and hears nothing,” Thami rants to Isabel. “He is out of touch with what is really happening to us blacks . His ideas about change are the old-fashioned ones. And what have they achieved? Nothing.”
In his old-fashioned way, Mr. M doggedly believes in a peaceful solution, a war of words which he says are “sacred.”
Above all, Mr. M believes that education can banish ignorance. “If you are not in that classroom tomorrow, you will be a very, very silly boy,” says Mr. M, exploding. “You are a silly boy now and without an education, you will grow up to be a stupid man!”
The polite debate that starts the play evolves into all-out war by play’s end.
“There are many moments in the play where the character must lose him or herself but the actor must remain mostly in control,” said Paessler, already a musical theater veteran who last fall starred in Theatre Bristol’s Cinderella. “This is a real test of being a good actor, and whether I do it successfully or not is yet to be seen.”
That controlled emotional roller coaster could easily derail an actor, but Paessler is taking his first role at ETSU with maturity.
“After a long, three-hour rehearsal, I usually come out feeling fairly drained emotionally,” Paessler says. “However, it is well worth it for the sake of the play.”
After all, Paessler says, Thami deserves respect, as well as pity. “Everyone deserves a chance to be heard and appreciated as a human being and as a person .” Paessler says. “I would want to resolve issues like Mr. M with the ‘sacred’ words of the English language. However, I most definitely understand where Thami is coming from, and perhaps if I were actually put in that situation I would find things within me I did not know existed.”
The emotionally charged subject has inspired the actors and director to schedule “talkbacks” after each show where audience members can make comments to and ask questions of the cast and crew. “I’m convinced this is a play people will want to talk about,” Peterson says.
Indeed, the biggest challenge of “My Children! My Africa!,” Parker says, lies with the audience, an educational and intellectual challenge that would pique even Mr. M’s deeper thought processes.
“It will be a challenge for our audiences to listen, to really listen,” Parker says. “Fugard lays a groundwork for emotion which, if one doesn’t listen, might be missed – and that would be a shame.”
After all, as Mr. M. says. “Be careful! Be careful! Don’t scorn words. They are sacred! Magical! Yes they are. Do you know that without words, a man can’t think?”
“My Children! My Africa!” is sponsored by ETSU Black Faculty & Staff Association, the President’s Council on Cultural Diversity, Multicultural Affairs and the African American Studies Program. Performances are Thursday, Feb. 7, and Friday, Feb. 8, at 7:30 p.m.
A special performance is scheduled for the Black Faculty & Staff Association Saturday, then the Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. is again open to the public. A free student performance is also scheduled Friday at noon. All performances will be in Bud Frank Theatre in ETSU’s Gilbreath Hall.
Tickets Thursday and Friday evenings and Sunday matinee are $15 general public and $7 students. For reservations or information, call 423.439.6511. For the BFSA event, contact Edith Tillman at 439-4280.

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