By Victor Greto
When Drury Pifer’s family returned to the United States in 1945 after living in southern Africa, the 11-year-old boy far outpaced his schoolmates.
He had mastered much of Shakespeare and Dickens, had learned Latin and grammar, and was infatuated with the King’s English.
By 12, his test scores were on a par with a typical American college junior.
But during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pifer also grew up fending off – psychologically and physically – the racial strife endemic in South Africa, its social world that, as in the American South of the time, separated black and white, native Africans from Afrikaners.
Although he had been born in South Africa in 1933, he felt separate from everyone there, the naïve and curious child of American parents among Nazi-sympathizing Germans and keep-your-chin-up British imperialists.
Not only did he prove to be intellectually far ahead of his American classmates, Pifer also had learned how to defend himself in a more blatantly violent world.
Once he got bored at American public schools — where “Robespierre and the guillotine had been replaced by Social Studies and Mickey Mouse” – “I became a delinquent,” he says.
The extreme: he threatened with a knife a fellow sixth grader who repeatedly bullied and tripped him.
“You do that again,” he told the boy, “and I’ll cut your throat.”
His mother quickly took him out of the public school and put him in a private one.
“It took me a decade to get comfortable” with American informality and the proper way to behave, says Pifer, now 74, an eclectic artist who paints, pens music, and has written more than 30 plays, one novel and a memoir.
His latest play, “Homeland Security,” runs through May 10 at Opera Delaware Studios. The play is produced by the City Theater Company, where Pifer is the resident playwright.
Both bookish and practical, Pifer became a bush pilot in Alaska and California after flying for the Navy during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In order to pay his way through college, he used his gangly 6’-2” frame to pitch semi-pro baseball, and worked in steel mills.
But his creativity pushed him relentlessly into the arts.
He enjoyed drawing, playing music, and loved the English language the way an adolescent boy experiences his first crush.
Although “supremely unambitious,” Pifer never learned how to contain his creative impulses. “I just work, work, work,” he says.
Work that results in an effusion of language.
“Words, words, words,” says Michael Gray, a co-founder of the City Theater Company who is directing Pifer’s “Homeland Security.”
“It’s always easy for me to pick out a Drury play based on the language,” he says. “The cool thing about Drury, every play is so different. There’s no template that he uses to develop his work. His love of language always comes through. And his wit.”
Language is always the key, says his wife Ellen Pifer, who ought to know.
A professor of modern and contemporary literature at the University of Delaware, she has written seminal literary criticism on Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow.
Pifer’s plays are poetic, dark, witty and biting, she says. “Things are happening every moment, and if you perform the plays, you have to understand different psychological shifts that are going on.”
Gray compares Pifer’s language-rich plays with the work of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the movies “A Few Good Men” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and most of the first four years of TV’s “The West Wing.”
“There’s a lot of words, so if you don’t clarify them for the audience, it zones out,” Gray says.
Many of the actors struggled at first with the parts in “Homeland Security,” he says, a two-act play that runs 93 manuscript pages long.
“These five actors have been working on this play for a couple of years, and the give and take between them can be draining and frustrating at times.”
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It was a hardscrabble existence growing up in southern Africa, Pifer recalls.
His parents moved there in 1932, because his father, a mining engineer, could not find work during the Great Depression.
They emigrated to Nigel, South Africa, where his father got a job as a gold miner.
Four years later, they moved to the Kalahari desert where he managed mines in Kleinzee and Orangemund, in Namibia, on the west coast of Africa.
“Life was tough,” Pifer says. “Winds blew every afternoon at 50 miles an hour. No movies. It was especially hard on my mother. But she’d always plant a garden, no matter where we lived.”
His mother longed to return to the United States, instilling in Pifer a feeling of being an American even though he never had been to the United States.
Pifer’s 1994 memoir, “Innocents in Africa,” explores his childhood experience.
He recalls being hated by both native Africans and Afrikaners (descendants of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch settlers), both of whom assumed he was British, the people who came to control much of the economy of South Africa after the turn of the 20th century.
“What had I done to merit the hostility of these ragged kids, with their shaved heads and dirty elbows?” he wrote. “I believed that I was an American. But everything about me was English, from my chirpy accent to my unconscious assumption of privilege.”
By the time he was 9, Pifer had spent all of three months in a classroom. Then, he began attending Christian Brothers College.
Pifer became further immersed in a classical education, taking to language both easily and sensually.
“Most satisfactory of all was scraping a nib full of ink across a sheet of paper, turning the nib this way and that to vary the line,” he wrote. “Even when I didn’t understand a word, a sentence, a paragraph, I still grasped the meaning, I had no idea how.”
As the war wound down, life got politically uncomfortable for his father, who worked for DeBeers, a British mining company.
Choosing to return to America, the family traveled north through Africa along the Kasai and Congo rivers during April 1945 in search of a ship. By mid-month, they heard of President Roosevelt’s death, and then heard of Hitler’s death two weeks later.
They eventually made their way to Seattle, where the family had lived before their African adventure. Pifer’s father found a position as a professor of mining engineering at the University of Washington.
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Pifer first started fiddling with writing music as early as the age of 8; he had been playing piano for a year. “But my father dissuaded me,” he says.
By his teens he was writing the music down. But he didn’t do any other kind of writing until college.
He attended the University of Washington and majored in history. He loved the subject, but felt the American way of education made one feel stupid. It just didn’t challenge him.
“The first time I realized I could learn and master something was when I became a pilot,” he says.
He had joined the Navy ROTC in college, learned how to fly, and loved it.
He served in the Navy for about five years. When he left, he became a bush pilot, and worked for Standard Oil, flying workers out to oil rigs in Alaska. He also flew in California, all to earn money, with an eye to going to Europe and write.
Creatively, “I was testing out different things, trying it figure out where the literary world was at that point,” he says.
He tried to write a novel, but couldn’t get past writing a series of portraits.
He worried that the novel as a genre was faltering, that he had been born a decade too late from the generation that gave birth to Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal, and was at least two generations removed from Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe.
He began to take piano lessons from Mills College professor Alexander Liebermann, in Oakland, Calif.
“He transformed how I played,” says Pifer, who is currently working on an opera called “Einstein That Summer.” “I learned to play all day and not get tired.”
It was at Mills College where he met his future wife, Ellen.
“He disrupted my life,” Ellen says, “because I was just 19 and going to school, a serious student and all that, and we met and suddenly I wasn’t doing all my work. My parents were alarmed; I had told them I would marry late in life. I married before all my friends, but I stayed married long after.”
After only a few months together, they married in 1962. Two years later, they moved to Europe to live and Pifer started his only published novel, “A Circle of Women.”
They returned to the United States in 1966. Over the next few years, Ellen earned a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, and Pifer completed his novel.
“Dru was older, but there were a lot of guys my age who were drafted, so we marched against the war a lot,” recalls Ellen.
Pifer’s book was published in 1970 and got fine reviews in Europe and in America.
He gave piano lessons, and then, as a relief from working for years on his book, wrote his first play, “The Fish,” which was produced in Berkeley.
As an outlet for his creativity, Pifer came to love the theater most of all.
“Plays are more social,” he says. “Writing is isolating, and I don’t like to be isolated. I like the complexities of the theater – light, space, directing – and a vision that puts parts together.”
He also realized he needed to do more than just write the plays.
“The only way to do theater is to organize your own,” says Pifer, who founded and directed the Berkeley Stage Company in 1973. “And if you’re good, people will show up.”
He has yet to write a play that has not been produced.
He ran the theater for three years, writing plays, raising money. But he began to fight with the two people he worked with, over their choice of plays and the purpose of the company.
“I wanted to succeed, and they were getting too precious,” he says.
Pifer jumped at the opportunity of moving to Delaware when Ellen found a job at UD in 1976.
He continued to write plays and founded another theater company, First Stage, in 1984, which produced several of his plays and lasted until 2000.
His plays also have been staged in New York, London and Denmark, and in the early 1990s, his play, “African Tourist,” was nominated for the Helen Hayes/Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play, and 1993’s “Strindberg in Hollywood” was nominated for Outstanding New Play.
He has been resident playwright at City Theater Company for four years.
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“Homeland Security” often reads like a screwball comedy of the 1930s, and in part shows Pifer’s love of two of his favorite comedies, the 1939 Howard Hawks farce, “His Girl Friday,” and Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot.”
The play, premised on the politics of the “Patriot Act” and a congressman and his wife’s attempt to navigate the labyrinthine adoption system they helped create, uses “over-the-top characters” to emphasize a couple’s – and a country’s – paranoid dissolution.
“There a topical essence,” says Gray, the director. “But there’s an everyman essence. These two people coming to terms with their marriage, how they grow, or don’t grow, within it.”
Politics is the impetus, he says, but it becomes secondary.
For the past several months, Pifer has concentrated on revising his play.
But he’s also working on an opera, and his home in Wilmington is full of his paintings, including one stunning portrait of his wife.
“I am stretched thin,” he says of his artistic output. “My ambitions are more than my lifespan.”
As an artist, he says he often feels like a worm burrowing through the earth.
“I sow and work and don’t know how it ends up,” he says. “It assumes a shape or form. If it’s good, I don’t know. You do the best you can.”