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Playwright Athol Fugard gets better with age.

Have You Seen Us?

Nov. 24-Dec. 20. Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive. $30-$70. 203-787-4282, longwharf.org.

It's immensely rewarding to work with an artist of this depth," says Long Wharf Theatre's Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein about playwright Athol Fugard.

"He's one big appetite," Fugard gushes about Edelstein — "for work, for people, for knowledge. I can't tell you how provocative and stimulating that can be."

How nice to see people holding hands in the theater once again.

During the recent economic downturn, you see many theaters making safe or uncomfortably commercial-minded decisions. Risk-taking is a rarity.

Long Wharf definitely took one last year when, instead of staging Victory, an established play by Fugard that'd already been announced, canceled that plan and debuted a brand-new work by the playwright instead. That play, Coming Home, was a stunner, not only ranking among the best of the dozens of dramas Fugard's turned out over his half-century writing career, but providing proof that he still has a vital contemporary voice, a social conscience and the common touch.

Now that Long Wharf has done the heavy lifting of producing the world premiere and getting Fugard's name out there again, major productions of Coming Home are scheduled for Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere.

So is Long Wharf resting on its laurels?

Ha!

It's world-premiering another Fugard play, Have You Seen Us?, the first not to be set in the playwright's native South Africa. The incendiary, argumentative action instead takes place in southern California, where Fugard now lives and teaches. The four-character squabble concerns a divorced college professor — "a weak and lonely man" — confronting personal demons in a small restaurant that's part of a non-descript shopping mall.

Have You Seen Us? stars Sam Waterston. Some playwrights might fret about having a well-known small-screen star in the cast, fearing some might have trouble separating him from Jack McCoy, the role he's played on "Law & Order" for 15 years.

New Haven theatergoers should have no such concerns, as in recent years they've seen Waterston stretch and triumph in such divergent projects as Gregory Boyd's revival of Tom Stoppard's Travesties at the Long Wharf in 2005 and in David Rabe's adaptation of Chekhov's short story The Black Monk at Yale Rep before that.

Neither does Fugard, who acted opposite Waterston in The Killing Fields 25 years ago.

"Sam Waterston is a true all-rounder," he says. "Not many screen actors are stage actors. To listen to him read the words I have written is very thrilling. It's an incredible coup for Gordon."

Fugard's first relations with Long Wharf were 35 years ago when the theater did the U.S. premiere of Sizwe Bansi is Dead, then moved the production to New York City. By the 1980s, thanks to entreaties by James Earl Jones and director/administrator Lloyd Richards, Fugard was premiering his plays at a different New Haven theater, the Yale Rep. It was at the Rep that his best-known work, Master Harold ... and the Boys, began, and where Fugard himself starred in his A Place with the Pigs.

"I think he knew the organization, had fond memories of it," Edelstein says of Fugard's return to the Long Wharf three and a half decades (and at least as many administrative turnovers) since he last developed new work there.

Fugard romanticizes it more: "Gordon is the person really responsible for engineering this marriage — or is it an engagement still, perhaps?," Fugard chuckles.

"My agent told Gordon to look at the production of Victory in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, I had just finished another play, and I asked him if he'd like to look at it. It had been an e-mail relationship at that point, but that was the start of a very serious relationship."

For his part, Fugard maintains that "I am a regional storyteller. The regional theater movement is my lifeblood." He deliberately keeps his casts small and his topics clear — "I could do any one of my plays standing by myself in your living room. I bring the theater."

A conversation with Fugard reminds you of what really matters about theater today. He's from a time in which a play about current events or political realities could get you thrown in jail or exiled. The bond between Fugard and Edelstein is greater than mutual admiration, bigger than the shared desire to still try and make a difference in an increasingly compromised theater world. It's an intense and productive working relationship. "A few nights ago," Fugard recalls, "I had this outrageous idea, and had to share it with Gordon. He listened patiently, then said 'It's all rubbish, of course,' and he was right."

The trust between these two men can't be understated.

Coming Home was the first Fugard premiere the playwright didn't direct himself. For the play's West Coast premiere, not only is Edelstein again at the helm, Fugard has allowed him to incorporate revisions of the script.

"I was happy with it, but Gordon feels he can go one better — or alter it for different venues. The writer doesn't know all the implications and resonances of his work," Fugard happily concedes.