About the Play:

Sorrows and Rejoicings has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Sorrows and Rejoicings is a full-length drama by Athol Fugard. Two women meet after a funeral, one black, one white: both have carried a lifelong love for the man who has just been buried. The man, a white writer, has spent much of his adult life in London, yet his escape from the South African regime has also proved a guilt-ridden exile. With lyrical grace, one of the world's greatest playwrights once again demonstrates the human struggle to transcend the treacherous injustices of history.

Sorrows and Rejoicings is a political play about the legacy of apartheid and the future of South Africa. Two women meet in a small Karoo village after the funeral of David Olivier (pronounced Dahvid Olifeer in Afrikaan), a political activist, writer and poet, the man they both loved. One is white and was his wife. The other is black and the mother of his child. David, who was driven into exile because of his political activism against apartheid, reappears in the searing memories of the women. During a hot afternoon of truth and reconciliation, treaties of love are painfully hammered out. The young confront the old, and what is hope for these individuals is hope for the new South Africa.

Sorrows and Rejoicings premiered in 2001 at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. The West Coast premiere was in 2002 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Cast: 3 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Fugard's most magical, heartbreaking study of South Africa." — New York Post

"Eloquent, moving and piercingly sad, ... Athol Fugard's play is rich in moments of intense anguish." — The New Yorker

About the Playwright:

Athol Fugard (1932-2025) was an internationally acclaimed South African playwright whose work deals with the political and social upheaval of the apartheid system in South Africa. In a career that spanned 70 years, he wrote more than 30 plays that are regularly performed in theatres in South Africa, Great Britain, the United States and around the world. Several of his plays have been adapted for the screen and his novel Tsotsi was made into a film that won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2011 he received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, while Time magazine described him in the 1985 as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.