I first met Russell Vandenbroucke in the summer of 1987 when he had just started as Northlight’s 5th Artistic Director. I was remounting Michael Maggio’s popular production of Dealing that summer, a piece about the Chicago Options Exchange.

During the performance, my wife Candy went into labor and told me to get home as soon as the curtain came down (I was also in the play), so I bowed and ran into the parking lot. Russ followed me out to talk about the performance, but I jumped in the car and said, “Candy’s having a baby!” I don’t think he knew who Candy was. I left him standing in the parking lot.

First impressions are always tricky.

After our youngest, Michaela, was born that night, I drove back to the theatre the next morning, exhausted and giddy, to apologize for my hasty retreat.

During his tenure, Russ was very good to me, asking me to direct and act with frequency. I was particularly moved when he asked me to pinch hit for him when his Dad was passing and he had to attend to him in Florida.

He modestly omits in his bio the Emmy Award for his production of Eleanor Roosevelt: In Her Own Words, which he then staged to open Northlight’s tenure at the Coronet Theatre.

His artistic and academic relationship with Athol Fugard’s work is celebrated and extensive, and I’ve asked him to weigh in on this theatrical giant’s legacy.

Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones

Recalling Athol 

Meeting in his dressing room after a New York matinee of Valley Song, which he’d served as playwright, director, and actor, Athol Fugard greeted me warmly, praised his co-star lavishly, and pointed mischievously to a message on his makeup mirror. A Chinese cookie had predicted good fortune for an “old fisherman.” His newest play, focused on a farmer and his granddaughter’s different views of their society’s future, had already opened to superb reviews, but Athol considered himself old at 64. That’s a surprise to recall since he died last month, at 92. He was also a fisherman who loved nature so much he learned the names of all the flora and fauna near his home in Port Elizabeth, abutting South Africa’s Indian Ocean. He relocated snakes warming themselves on the tarmac to prevent them from being pancaked by passing cars. Appreciation for the environment did not extend to the society enveloping him.

Beyond seizing the opportunity to see Athol’s newest production—his agent had already sent me the script—I wanted him to know I was eager to direct it at Northlight once the rights for regional productions were released. Four months later, May of 1996, we opened at North Shore Country Day in Winnetka, the latest stop in our perpetual search for a home of our own. In my 11 seasons, we mounted 60 productions at 11 Chicagoland venues, plus Berkeley and Seattle. Securing a place to play for the theatre entrusted to me was the weightiest responsibility of my career, and it helps explain why we burned through three Managing Directors and were straining a fourth when we opened in Winnetka.

My memories of institutional impermanence bend quickly to the dispossession of human beings. The title characters of Athol’s Boesman and Lena (1969) are itinerants without a surname or a home. They spend the night the play is set in an impromptu shanty they construct. Today, homelessness is as familiar to me as it is to most Americans, but that wasn’t so when I read the play or saw Tom Bullard’s New York production. (In my second Northlight season, he directed Athol’s Road to Mecca at ye olde Kingsley School, neither forgotten nor missed.) I treasure Boesman and Lena’s irresolvable, existential quandaries, including Lena’s yearning to have a family, a hope that repeatedly collapses in miscarriages and infant mortality. Athol’s mastery of dialogue as evocative as any poetry is never more eloquent than Lena’s, “your shadow so heavy you leave it on the ground.” 

Oops, I nearly forgot! The play is set in multi-racial South Africa amidst apartheid, and its impoverished title characters are “Coloured,” South African parlance for mixed race. 

I divulge these details last because Athol’s nationality and the race of his characters are too often perceived as both his foreground and background. A facile tag, “South African playwright,” supersedes or shadows or minimizes—or all three!—his mastery at fathoming the depths of human experiences that transcend any specific time or place. That explains why he remains one of the world’s most revered and frequently produced playwrights. Details matter in art, but they are never determinative or, when they are, such works don’t remain vital for long. Hamlet is not in perpetual production because it focuses on a Danish prince who drops out of college to return home following his father’s untimely death. 

Boesman and Lena leads me to experience life-crushing poverty, the brutality of men toward women, and to wonder why so many citizens of the world’s richest nation, my own, have no home. The “there and then” of Athol’s plays prompts me, immediately, to contemplate my here and now. 

Biracial brothers in Blood Knot (1961) endure different opportunities and treatment because of their different skin colors. They are engulfed in structural racism, a concept recently banished from official nomenclature in America despite our history of slavery for 157 years before the Declaration of Independence, then another 89 years after it. Poof!  Embedded and sanctioned racism has disappeared as if by magic. 

“Master Harold” . . . and the Boys” (1982) dramatizes how human beings can hate those closest and kindest to them, if only for a volcanic minute, then bear the psychic toll that follows for the rest of their lives. 

Statements after an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1972) climaxes when police invade a library, after dark, to photograph naked lovers in an interracial affair. The first production that I imagined directing was delayed. The second, in Louisville, sidestepped Covid, then rampant, by having the audience attend via Zoom. That technology echoed the intrusion of the Peeping Tom police. Still more eerie, in the time between discussing a production, then directing it, police had murdered Breonna Taylor, in the middle of the night, after mistakenly assuming her former boyfriend was with her. Both were Black. 

Athol had not anticipated Louisville headlines, but his grasp of men and women entangled in flawed societies, which harm them, had. He is no more a provincial South African playwright than is Northlight, simply, a regional theatre—one that, I’m told, will soon possess the safe, secure, and permanent home it long has sought.

Russell Vandenbroucke

Before serving as Northlight’s Artistic Director from 1987-1998, Vandenbroucke published Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard, subsequently listed among “Best Books in Print” by The New York Review of Books. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Louisville and Founding Director of its Peace, Justice, and Conflict Transformation program.