BY EVAN HENERSON >THEATER CRITIC

When a gleam of sunlight - no matter how faint - can't be traced from Athol Fugard, it might well be time to reach for the razors and sleeping pills.

"Victory," the hard-hitting and incongruously titled new play by Fugard, in its American premiere at the Fountain Theatre, is as tough and compact as it is grim. That "Victory" finds the South Africa-born playwright writing this gloomily about his country post-apartheid is an eye-opener. Hopelessness, even in the midst of social devastation, is not this playwright's hallmark.

But a personal violation and betrayal can apparently quell optimism in a hurry. Based - as many of his plays are - on experiences from his own life, Fugard takes a home break-in and unravels its wider social implications for the man being robbed and for the thieves.

At barely an hour in length, Stephen Sachs' throat-clutcher of a production is more snapshot than meditation. Fugard's plays have been getting increasingly tighter and more economical as the man ages, and this one is about as lean as it gets.

In his program note, Fugard links "Victory" with his 1994 "Valley Song," another three-character play centering around a black South African girl with dreams that a newly liberated nation might be able to help bring to reality. Victoria, the linchpin of "Victory," is by no measure so hopeful.

Which is why, half-drunk and uncertain of what she's doing, teenage Vicky (played by Tinashe Kajese) follows her boyfriend, Freddie (played by Lovensky Jean-Baptiste), into the house of Lionel (Morlan Higgins), the widowed writer who once employed Vicky's now-deceased mother as a maid. This is the abode where Vicky used to play, and she remembers how Lionel used to pay in cash.

That's enough of an incentive for Freddie, a thuggish kid with a rap sheet and dreams of joining a street gang in Capetown. They break in, Vicky starts swilling booze, and Freddie trashes the place, going so far as to urinate on Lionel's books. Inevitably, Lionel returns home to find the robbery in progress. "Vicky?" he utters plaintively. "You?"

Lionel's attempt to understand what has brought Vicky and Freddie to this act brings the play to its tragic conclusion. Hopes and dreams are broached and quickly squelched, and it is Lionel who sadly proclaims that this betrayal has leeched his spirit of whatever optimism remains.

Higgins, who played a famous actor in the premiere of Fugard's "Exits and Entrances" at the Fountain, is a study in defeat and deflation. Lionel may yet take something away from this encounter, but Higgins - playing a version of the playwright - presents a man who needs to shove aside his demoralization long enough to start anew.

In Vicky, Kajese vividly offers a damaged girl at a crossroads. The character is supposed to have enough innate goodness to keep Lionel interested in her well-being, but her ties to the detestable Freddie, isare problematic to say the least.

And in the end, we have no idea whether she'll be all right. More importantly, for this bleak but still important play by an important dramatist, neither does Athol Fugard.

Evan Henerson (818) 713-3651 evan.henerson@dailynews.com