"My job," Athol Fugard has said, "is to witness as truthfully as I can the nameless and destitute of one little corner of the world." Packed into those words is a loving, fierce, unremitting confrontation with the outrageousness of the existence of the nameless many who inhabit that corner: the Eastern Cape region of South Africa…. The characters in his plays reverberate with life…. Poverty, pain, dumb dreams are their lot yet—battered, bruised, with their violence and mockery directed against each other—they are alive. Forced to face the facts of their wretchedness, outraged they yet survive. And because Fugard writes as close as he can get to the bone—"meat is something that must rot or be cut away before the hard white truth is exposed"—essentially local characters from the littered slums around the industrial center of Port Elizabeth become universal; his language, often stemming...