The title of Athol Fugard's new play, "A Lesson from Aloes" …, is so apt that its four words serve as an accurate précis of the entire work and threaten to render some of its more didactic passages superfluous. We are early instructed that aloes are a kind of plant to be found growing on the South African veldt; prickly and not very pleasing to look at, they survive in a hostile climate, and the lesson they furnish is that even against high odds life can assert itself and prove well worth living. Fugard's aloes are at once a metaphor and a model: the three characters who make up the cast are themselves—so we are invited to perceive—a higher form of aloes; if they are allowed to take root, they may be able (in the words of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech) not only to endure but...