Our first Community Conversation, via Zoom, in August, hosted by the West Hartford Public Library.

Athol Fugard’s Victory

Fall, 2020

In 2019, Capital Classics’ launched our newest project: The Contemporary Classics Program. The project seeks to highlight contemporary English-language plays and playwrights whose work is deserves to be read or seen, especially as it relates to the context of our current social climate. Because Shakespeare was a voice and sounding board for the era and society that he was from, we seek to find important contemporary theatrical voices and how their contributions are helping shape modern performance and the society that it reflects.

Beginning in August of 2020, Capital Classics began hosting a series of Community Conversations, part performance and part discussion, centered around one of the most influential voices in the contemporary theater, Athol Fugard.

Acclaimed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world” by Time Magazine and honored with a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011, Athol Fugard is best known for his political plays which dissect apartheid, the institutionalized racial segregation that existed in his native South Africa for much of the 20th century. Though focused specifically on that political system, Fugard’s ability to universalize the struggles of a character and find the resonance of the human connection beyond those details reminds us strongly of Shakespeare.

Our Community Conversations center on Fugard’s 2007 play, Victory. The conversations consist of a cast of actors performing selected scenes from the play and then eliciting responses to the material from our audience, engaging in a conversation about the topics contained in the play: Power and Privilege, Race and Opportunity, Forcing Change through Violence, Womens’ Roles in Leadership, and the Inherent Inequity of Poverty.

Look for more conversations to continue throughout the fall and plan to attend and speak out.