Stage
Weales, Gerald
STAGE that lightens his whole countenance when it comes, as it...
...The relentless who feel assaulted by the vermin-ridden garbage, a product sound of their feet and the commanding chant-singing infuse of John Africa's theories about natural living...
...Open Doors ately because Italy, always portrayed in earlier movies as chaotwas basically a political thriller and required a solid plot, sus- ic but convivial, has, in Amelio's vision, become singularly penseful rhythms, menace-laden dialogue, and juicy charac- American in its noisiness...
...Second, Stolen Children place where you are always in public, and the public forms a has been made in a completely different style from Open Doors singularly "lonely crowd...
...by the noise of the production with an urgency and an inevitability that gives loudspeakers blaring obscenities and demands aimed at the the skeletal dramatic outline the strength that the subject mat- city government...
...As the children are driven, by train and car, my admiration for its creator in two ways...
...Since the children are Sicilian, they are reassigned to a Sicilian orphanage and TRUST A COP Criaco disgustedly accepts the prolongation of his wretched asAMELIO'S 'STOLEN CHILDREN' signment...
...The tension on the block led to the comThere is more to the production than Ladysmith Black plaints that belatedly brought action which destroyed the Mombazo...
...And he's used the faces of his young actors as emotional full force...
...Maria Volante, helped make it the finest film re- It is a heartwarming scenario yet the film, though poignant leased in this country in 1991...
...Significantly, these places are either above ground (on the rooftops of inns, the terraces of hotels) or apart from the city (the beach...
...His is a re- lives of the MOVE members, the homes of their neighbors, markable performance...
...sysand untheatrical tempos that may try the patience of some view- tems, train whistles, car and train engines are all performing at ers...
...iota of melodrama, Amelio has given it a less designed look Car radios, portable cassette players, television sets, P.A...
...The play is a chronicle of the MOVE disof people, black and white, adults and children...
...The remainder of the film shows how the young Open Doors, with its beautifully autumnal cine- soldier enacts his good intentions and how the kids respond to matography and the great performance of Gian the treatment...
...As Gibbons makes clear Yourgrau intended to write...
...Amelio has set himStolen Children, isn't on the same artistic plane but it sustains self a harsher task...
...He knows that these children have been robbed of their childhood and he determines to restore a piece The rich but subtle theatricality of Gianni Amelio's of it to them...
...The film begins, aren't discomfited by the racket...
...6221 may have been a voyage of dis- binieri are charged with escorting the children to an orphanage covery for its author, as the program note suggests, but what in Civitavecchia, but one of them skips off to visit a girlfriend...
...There is K. Todd Freeman as Jacob...
...He does, miraculously, find places where he and the kids can face and hear each other...
...a complex social and racial situation-one Arrested because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not destined to reach as large an audience Jacob is beaten by the police before he is released to his father, as The Song of Jacob Zulu-is 6221, Protreatment that alters Jacob's sense of himself and his society...
...The explosion kills or injures a number tomary brief run...
...The fire this time was Commonweal 7 May 1993: 19 a victory for no one...
...Jacob is found aster in Philadelphia (May 13, 1985), in which a confrontation guilty and executed...
...one of the main figures in the play is Jim Berghaier, a poTheir performance, based on the music which miners used to liceman who saved one of the MOVE children and who later entertain themselves when they were isolated, far from their suffered a breakdown and left the force as a result of the events home villages, consists of a cappella singing and accompany- of that day...
...These confrontations are the core of this film and they are also the scenes that will divide any audience into those who are ready for Stolen Children and those who will find it a bore...
...Why even try...
...phecy and Tragedy...
...But the adult male who has temporary charge of her is determined not to let her sink into such despair...
...Two cara- an adult male in an intimate setting...
...It is an insanely new, impersonal, noisy country, a teraction of society and the individual...
...Otherwise the large cast of characters is played by a group of actors who perform multiple roles, sometimes as many as five...
...This hubbub isn't that of friends greetterizations by seasoned players...
...And though another director might have been tempted to jolly things along with scenes of easy pathos 20: 7 May 1993 Commonweal...
...A woman is hustled off to happen to the girl, in light of her frightening past, would be to prison and her children made wards of the state because the live in a noisy public place forever and never again have to face mother has prostituted her eleven-year-old daughter...
...Written by Thomas Gibbons with the active particpaFor the most part the characters lack depth, are more types tion of director Seth Rozin, 6221, like Jacob Zulu, works in than individuals, and the brief scenes that recount Jacob's brief scenes, asks the actors to play a great many roles, and growing involvement with rebellion are little more than illus- eschews conventional realistic narrative, not with music in trative moments...
...His voice and his expressive face (a smile and the reputations of the city officials...
...accumulation of arms...
...Who could commaps to be read by the camera rather than as instruments of pete...
...and by the implicit threat of violence in the ter demands...
...STAGE that lightens his whole countenance when it comes, as it does infrequently) help him give more to the character than the lines and scenes seem to provide, but he speaks most eloquently in LAMENTS & WARNINGS body language-the way he stands, droops, draws himself up, 'JACOB ZULU' & '6221' shifts physically within scenes, gestures with hands that cannot possibly be as long as they seem to be...
...But since Stolen Children is a ing each other in cafes or merchants extolling their wares in a nearly plotless account of the fate of three innocents shaped public market...
...yet, in a prayer/con- itself as a purifying force within a corrupt and racist society, fession in his cell he indicates that his memory of the dead chil- led to the bombing of the MOVE house (the number in the dren after the bombing of the camp made him want to kill...
...he found was fashioned for the audience into a lament and a The other officer, Criaco, scarcely more than a boy himself, warning...
...Amelio's latest, enough, never even attempts to jerk tears...
...dren...
...Although the city officials come Mambazo joined Yourgrau and director Eric Simonson to cre- across as inept and self-serving, they are not villains...
...It isn't even like that of the revelers and paparazzi and misshaped by their environments and doesn't contain an in La Dolce Vita...
...Gibbons ate the work at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 1992...
...First, this fine movie to the south, the director presents an Italy that we have never is further proof that Amelio is a tough-minded humanist who seen or heard before in either Italian films or in American movies asks disturbing questions about the sometimes monstrous in- about Italy...
...The noise is coming mostly from machines...
...In fact, there are moments in significantly, in Milan, the latest hotbed of Italy's seemingly this movie when you feel that the most merciful thing that could unstanchable political corruption...
...These limitations would be fatal to a realis- this case but by jumping back and forth between the events tic political play, but that was never what playwright Tug and the later hearings about them...
...Their usual repertoire runs to tradition- his followers, are victims, they are not innocent victims...
...The kids on hopelessness without quite falling into it...
...apartheid...
...For Amelio's camera attends, waits upon, the children's responses as patiently as Criaco does, and these responses aren't quick in coming...
...They serve as narrators, describing events and com- (or a philosophy) that sets them apart as a kind of radical elite menting on them, but they also become group characters from who show contempt for their neighbors-middle-class blacks police to Zulu ancestors in a dream sequence...
...Based loosely on actual events, the play presents Jacob, as the opening song says, as one "for whom the good news/Of nother play which deals successfully with the end of apartheid (if it really is the end)/Comes too late...
...their ears to the few mumbled words of a couple of kids who The story is an odyssey from north to south, from Milan to have been stunned into near-silence by the unspeakable crimes Sicily, from utter despair to a sort of truce with life that teeters committed in the locked rooms of their own home...
...How could they be, given the state of shock the kids are in...
...He wanted a musical chorus of some in a program note, the play is not propaganda for any one readkind and that happily is what he got when Ladysmith Black ing of the lamentable event...
...No wonder the passers-by are mute...
...Without title), the unintended burning of sixty-one houses in the same condoning his action, the play makes clear that Jacob Zulu is block, and the death of eleven people-six adults and five chila victim as well as a terrorist...
...And, amid all that noise, who can attune virtuoso acting...
...At first there is nothing but muted hostility between the children and their guard, but Criaco's impatience is undermined by his humanity...
...GERALD WEALES but intelligent and honorable, takes the kids to the state home only to learn that its officials don't want a former prostitute on SCREEN the premises even though she's only eleven years old and no willing collaborator in her own corruption...
...The puts racist epithets in the mouths of some of the police, but power of the piece lies with Joseph Shabalala and his group...
...InterAct Theatre He joins the African National Congress, distributes leaflets, leaves Company, one of the more imaginative small groups in the country to train in an ANC camp, which is bombed by South Philadelphia, gave over its complete season to the creation of African planes while he is there, and returns to set off a bomb 6221, although it was performed only for the company's cusin a shopping center...
...Although the MOVE members, John Africa and ing dance movements...
...His lawyer blames the system and Jacob between the police and MOVE, a group which saw (and sees) testifies that the deaths were unintentional...
...al and church songs, but in Jacob Zulu they are more obviously Their criticism of society, some of which is valid, is a faith political...
...In a few cases-noIr he story that The Song of Jacob Zulu tells is about tably Zakes Mokae, who plays Jacob's austere but loving faa young South African black man, the son of a ther, the man who betrays him, and a strange tramp-prophet minister, who wants to achieve within the system who tries to persuade him to return to his family-individual and who at first holds himself aloof from his more actors stand out from the company, but for the most part they radical fellow students who risk arrest and police provide the setting for Freeman's Jacob and Ladysmith Black violence to protest the inadequacy of black schools under Mombazo...
...I use the Riesman phrase deliberand this isn't just a case of aesthetic restlessness...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 9
