Aloe

More blue skies.

Over the weekend I repotted several of our aloe plants. These are the offshoots of a single plant my wife brought into our lives probably more than twenty years ago. The various plants live in a collection of pots on the front porch. Every time I tend these aloes I am reminded of the play A Lesson from Aloes by the South African playwright Athol Fugard that we saw in the Eighties at the Berkeley Rep. This was in the old days when the theater company had a much smaller budget for set design than it does today. The set was a bare stage with potted aloes around the edges. It was a powerful play, beautifully and simply performed about a white couple and a black friend in apartheid South Africa. It is funny how memory works. Most of the plays we saw then, a quarter century ago, are lost to me, but this little collection of mostly neglected potted plants holds close a thin thread of memory of long ago.

The amazing recent movie Tsotsi was based on another of his plays.

J

Update: I found that an image from the production referred to can be seen here. It is an extract from the book The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard, by Albert Wertheim.