CAPE TOWN - Athol Fugard, the renowned South African playwright, paced at the edge of a plywood stage, rubbing his head and listening intensely to two actors run through their lines. Rehearsals for his new play, “The Train Driver,” had begun.

With stents in his arteries and his hearing fading, Mr. Fugard, 77, is back telling stories shaped by South Africa’s tormented racial history. But for the first time, a drama by this grand old man of the South African stage had its premiere at the Fugard, a new theater named in his honor.

“I want you to do something for me,” Mr. Fugard told Sean Taylor, who plays a white train driver searching for the grave of a black woman who had stood on the tracks directly in his path with a baby on her back, waiting for death. Mr. Taylor had laughed dementedly in Scene 3.

Mr. Fugard, directing a play for the first time in a decade, told him, “Nothing is funny. No jokes. It’s all real.” The Fugard is among many privately organized efforts that aim to help South Africa overcome the damage wrought by its colonial and apartheid-era past. The theater’s creators hope the transfiguring power of art will help change this breathtakingly beautiful, but still highly segregated, city by the sea.

Housed in what were once 19th-century textile warehouses and an old Gothic church hall, the Fugard now provides a permanent home for Isango Portobello, an all-black troupe of actors and singers, mostly from the nearby township of Khayelitsha, that has won critical acclaim across Europe.

The hope is that the Fugard and its resident acting ensemble will attract people of all races to mingle . Eric Abraham, the South African-born film and theater producer who has financed both the theater and Isango Portobello, said he believes the talents of the acting ensemble will prove to be “an antidote to prejudice.” The seating has been intentionally left open .

“It’s about aspirational hope, and that’s as much needed as delivery of water, electricity and shelter in this city,” Mr. Abraham said.

The theater had its gala opening in February on the fringes of District Six, an area with particular resonance here. In 1966, the district was designated for whites only and its mostly mixedrace (as they were classified) residents were forced out and their homes bulldozed as part of the white minority government’s apartheid scheme.

At the opening, the country’s deputy president and various cabinet ministers watched Isango Portobello perform “The Magic Flute - Impempe Yomlingo,” with Mozart’s score transposed for an orchestra of marimbas.

“I assure you that every audience in this house will be sitting in the lap of a ghost,” Mr. Fugard, his eyes brimming with tears, told the audience, referring to the 60,000 residents of District Six who were driven from their homes during the apartheid years.

The theater’s organizers acknowledge that they have a long way to go in building a multiracial audience. On a recent evening, virtually every person at “The Magic Flute” was white .

“It looks like the Cape Town liberal elite,” said Jacky Davis, a British doctor who volunteered in a black township 30 years ago and was visiting the city as a tourist.

Mr. Fugard said that the new democratic South Africa - struggling with poverty and corruption, among other challenges - needs the arts of stagecraft “as urgently as the old South Africa needed those first few daring, sometimes suicidal acts of defiance in the theater.”


By CELIA W. DUGGER