It was in 1996, an early spring night, that the events of 1967 came flooding back to me. I was 10 years old then, growing up in South Africa.

And almost 30 years later, the incidents of a terrible night, so carefully tucked away for so long, were full blown in my mind, like an old ghost, stepping forward from the shadows, not to whisper but to shout and shout and shout. ...

The tragedy was the murder of my grandfather on his farm, Clova, five hours by car north of Johannesburg. At that young age, my response was to hide it away like a bad dream. Clova was lost to us forever, the idyllic playground of my childhood holidays, a simple but beloved place.

My last moment at Clova was spent rolling down the back windows of the car, waving goodbye to my grandparents standing on the porch of their simple farmhouse, my loved picaninni friends running in the clouds of gravel kicked up by the wheels and jumping on to the big wire gate to swing it closed. Slowly we drove away toward the Soutpansberg mountains, always magically blue.

Home to Ferndale, Johannesburg. A few months later, I ran into the house to find it shrouded in silence and grief. There had been an attack at Clova. At first, all the details were murky, whispered, contained in the closed circle of the adults. The snippets of it that I overheard, the bits and pieces that fell into place over the weeks that followed, I would banish from my everyday and move forward into the rest of my life, never allowing it in.

But almost three decades later, the events of that night would return unexpectedly as a gift, opening a door to a new journey of healing. I came to live in America at 26, with a broken heart about the place I grew up in, and didn't know it until I met a supremely gifted teacher named Larry Moss. In 1996, I was attending a class given by Larry who was widely regarded as the finest acting teacher of our time. It was a night much like any other until Larry said to the class: "Turn to the person next to you, and tell them a story ..." Clova roared into my mind. Trying to ignore it, I heard Larry say to the class, "don't censor whatever just came up. Tell that story."

Slowly, I began to mouth the thoughts I had had as we drove home from burying my grandfather on a dusty, hot, sad day. As I told the story, I began to realize how I had tried at 10 to make sense of the unimaginable. My grandfather was an immensely kind and humane man, beloved by the black families he allowed to live on his farm.

The murky details revolved around a man the police called a terrorist, who may have slipped across the Rhodesian border at night-time. He had randomly attacked my grandparents. He had walked into the open front door of the farmhouse, stabbed my grandfather 22 times in the back, smashed a paraffin lamp into my grandmother's face, cutting her eyes, burning her skin, then fled into the night with a British army issue rifle from the war and a trunk from under the bed. In that trunk were the treasures of a simple, honourable life-papers, photographs, my great grandfather's correspondence with Darwin, 40 Rand in savings, and medals from the East African engagement against Hitler, medals for courage and bravery.

Given the task of staging the story we had just told, I brought the first piece into class and after the deeply emotional response, Larry said: "This is extraordinary material. You must write it." At first I wrote very close to my own life, and then I began to feel a freedom to write to a much wider scope, to tell a story that would speak to something I wanted to say as an artist.

The syringa Tree is an epic story, a love story about a family and a place. It's about the inhumanity of racism, the love between a child and her caretaker, the laws which separated black children from their mothers, a deep and abiding love of the land, and the spiritual connection between the earth and its people. It speaks of the pain of exile, the longing and remembrance of a time of innocence, that place in all our hearts where we knew no judgement, only curiosity and love. And of the ultimate sacrifice, the giving of one's life for freedom, the legacy of those children who died at the hands of the police in South Africa.

As a young person, I saw three choices: the path of the revolutionary; the path of denial, not very difficult with the heavy media censorship that prevailed; or getting as far away from it as possible. I left, not able to bear what was happening, entering into a painful silence about a place I loved so much. I didn't realize the depth of my desire to escape, clouded as it was by the curiosity of youth. I wanted to see the world.

As I began to write, instead of silence and confusion, a well of grief opened up, grief and joy, loss and remembrance, and exquisite gain. "I wrote for weeks with tears pouring, and suddenly I had The Syringa Tree, and Larry and I began to work.

This year, we had the great joy of bringing The Syringa Tree to New York, with the courageous help of a magnificent producer, Matt Salinger. Amidst the hundreds of letters, tears of remembrance, and the celebration of new hope now in South Africa, two things stand out in my mind. One, the poignancy of a line someone wrote to me: "My South Africa is gone forever — thankfully." And the other, a black South African woman who saw the play here in New York and said to me, through her tears, "if you could bring this to South Africa, it would be so healing for us all."

Her name is Thosama, which means to be humble, and her words humbled me. I am haunted by the children who lost their lives for freedom. The Syringa Tree, in the end, is a tribute to them. I fell grateful that somehow, I was chosen to be the vessel of this story in the world. I stand humbled by what they did, proud and grateful. As a child of South Africa, stunned into silence so long ago, my deepest desire is that the voices of the children of South Africa ring out in freedom. May they shout in joy forever.