IN: Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard OIS (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in South African English. He is best known for his political plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy Award-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. Fugard is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For the academic year 2000-2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana.

In the 1960s, Fugard formed the Serpent Players, whose name derives from their first venue, the former snake pit at the Port Elizabeth Museum, "a group of black actors worker-players who earned their living as teachers, clerks, and industrial workers, and cannot thus be considered amateurs in the manner of leisured whites", developing and performing plays "under surveillance of the Security Police according to Loren Kruger's The Dis-illusion of Apartheid published in 2004." The group largely consisted of black men, including Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Welcome Duru, Fats Bookholane and Mike Ngxolo as well as Nomhle Nkonyeni and Mabel Magada. They all got together, albeit at different intervals, and decided to do something about their lives using the stage. In 1961 they met Athol Fugard, a white man who grew up in Port Elizabeth and who recently returned from Johannesburg, and asked him if he could work with them as he had the theatre know-how, how to use the stage, movements, and everything else. They worked with Athol Fugard since then and that is how the Serpent Players go together. At the time, the group performed anything they could lay their hands on in South Africa as they had no access to any libraries. These included Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare and many other prominent playwrights of the time. In an interview in California, Ntshona and Kani were asked why they were doing the play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which was considered a highly political and telling story of the South African political landscape at the time. Ntshona answered: "We are just a group of artists who love theatre. And we have every right to open the doors to anyone who wants to take a look at our play and our work. We believe that art is life and conversely, life is art. And no sensible man can divorce one from the other. That's it. Other attributes are merely labels". They mainly performed at the St Stephen's Hall - renamed the Douglas Ngange Mbopa Memorial Hall in 2013 - adjacent to St Stephen's Church, and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.  According to Loren Kruger, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago,  the Serpent Players used Brecht's elucidation of gestic acting, dis-illusion, and social critique, as well as their own experience of the satiric comic routines of urban African vaudeville, to explore the theatrical force of Brecht's techniques, as well as the immediate political relevance of a play about land distribution. Their work on the Caucasian Chalk Circle and, a year later, on Antigone led directly to the creation, in 1966, of what is still [2004] South Africa's most distinctive Lehrstuck [learning play]:'The Coat. Based on an incident at one of the many political trials involving the Serpent Players, The Coat dramatized the choices facing a woman whose husband, convicted of anti-apartheid political activity, left her only a coat and instructions to use it.

Did they perform anywhere else.

OUT: and other spaces in and around New Brighton, the oldest Black township in Port Elizabeth.


IN: Steranko was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. According to Steranko's authorized biography, his grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to settle in the anthracite coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania. Steranko's father, one of nine siblings, began working in the mines at age 10, and as an adult became a tinsmith. Steranko later said his father and uncles "would bootleg coal - they would go up into a mountain and open up a shaft.

During the day, Steranko made his living as an artist for a printing company in his hometown of Reading, designing and drawing pamphlets and flyers for local dance clubs and the like. He moved on after five years to join an advertising agency, where he designed ads and drew products ranging from "baby carriages to beer cans". Interested in writing and drawing for comic books, he visited DC Comics as a fan and was treated to a tour of the office by editor Julius Schwartz, who gave Steranko a copy of a script featuring the science-fiction adventurer Adam Strange. Steranko recalled in 2003, "It was the first full script I'd ever seen, complete with panel descriptions and dialogue. I learned a lot from it and eventually went on to create a few comics of my own."  He initially entered the comics industry in 1957, not long out of high school, working for a short time inking pencil art by Vince Colletta and Matt Baker in Colletta's New York City studio before returning to Reading. In 1966, he landed assignments at Harvey Comics under editor Joe Simon, who as one writer described was "trying to create a line of super heroes within a publishing company that had specialized in anthropomorphic animals." Here Steranko created and wrote the characters Spyman, Magicmaster and the Gladiator for the company's short-lived superhero line, Harvey Thriller. His first published comics art came in Spyman #1 (Sept. 1966), for which he wrote the 20-page story "The Birth of a Hero" and penciled the first page, which included a diagram of a robotic hand that was reprinted as an inset on artist George Tuska's cover.  Steranko also approached Marvel Comics in 1966. He met with editor Stan Lee, who had Steranko ink a two-page Jack Kirby sample of typical art for the superspy feature "Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.". Steranko self-published it in 1970 in the limited-edition "Steranko Portfolio One"; it appeared again 30 years later in slightly altered form in the 2000 trade-paperback collection Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. This led to Lee's assigning him the Nick Fury feature in Strange Tales, a "split book" that shared each issue with another feature. Future Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, then a staff writer, recalled,  [H]e came up to the office ... and I was sent out by Sol [Brodsky] to look at his work and basically brush him off. Stan was busy and didn't want to be bothered that day. But when I saw Jim's work, ... on an impulse I took it in to Sol and said, 'I think Stan should see this'. Sol agreed, and took it in to Stan. Stan brought Steranko into his office, and Jim left with the 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' assignment. ... I think Jim's legacy to Marvel was demonstrating that there were ways in which the Kirby style could be mutated, and many artists went off increasingly in their own directions after that.

did that do well?

OUT: