There’s a song they sing when there is a funeral in some of the rural parishes of Louisiana. "The graveyard ain’t got no memories," they sing, the message being that if you are in this place, there are no memories to haunt you. It’s not just the dead who are afraid of the memories, but the living are fearful as well, and it can be even tougher on those left behind if they try to make those memories clear.

That is the essence of "The Train Driver," the powerful drama by Athol Fugard that opened over the weekend at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. Fugard is a South African playwright who has built a giant reputation writing about his country and the apartheid that was for so long a way of life.

He trods this familiar ground again, this time with the story of Roelf Visagie, a train driver who runs over and kills a woman and her baby who were standing on the tracks of his train. The accident plunges the driver into deep despair, and he has come to a cemetery in search of the memory of the woman and her child so that he might "curse at them" to free him from his guilty sin.

There is no doubt that Roelf is a man alive, but he seems empty, hollowed as he says goodbye to his soul, leaving him nothing more than a shattered man.

It is anger that drives him, anger at the woman who stood quietly waiting for the train and anger at himself. Her death has wound itself around what is left of his soul, and he is fiercely angry.

He has brought his anger to this cemetery for "the sleeping people" – those with no name – presided over by Simon, a black grave digger who marks each new grave with a piece of debris to make sure he doesn’t dig there again. Simon is fearful of Roelf from the very beginning, wondering why a white man would daringly search through this mysterious burial ground.

But the train driver’s story eventually touches the heart of Simon, who invites Roelf to share his meager existence – all the while helping to guide Roelf away from anger and to the more comfortable empathy that he develops for the woman and all the others so abjectly discriminated against by the ruling white class.

Fugard is at his best when he draws razor sharp pictures of the excess of the dominant white society and excessive pain and brutality of the the world of the poor black. In this one, he wraps us all in the overwhelming and bitter guilt that so strangles the white man.

Simon, having been burned often, struggles to accept this white man into the barren landscape in which he lives. If not friendship, the vestige of some kind of equality salves each man.

Roelf has come looking for a kind of retribution, but failing that, discovers something about himself that will allow him to move on with his life.

David Daniel, a core company member at American Players Theatre, plays Roelf with a mixture of chest-puffing and woe-is-me tears so that we can all be very clear about this man’s pain.

Michael A. Torrey’s Simon is a mixture of the wise old man and the plaintive servant, seemingly pleased with whatever role is in store for him.

Lisa Schlenker designed a cemetery that captures the disturbing silence mixed with the pain of memory that holds so much, not for the dead, but for those of us left behind.