Woza Afrika!
Wren, Celia
Celia Wren AFTER APARTHEID LiriColrl Ceiifer-> Afrikw • r happens when -yenr non out enemies? This plaintive ;.ut stion, uttered by one of ht protean figures in the :L. n: •i;:h:Africanone-act...
...The stage for Bergville Stories was bare, except for a window frame that descended periodically on a wire to emphasize the separation between the hostel dwellers, trapped inside the building, and their enemies lying in wait...
...The rousing curtain call outshone some of this year's Broadway spectacles...
...Back in the days before Nelson Mandela was released, politics and protest fueled South Africa's dynamic theater scene...
...A similar message might have been incorporated into the only preliberation play in this Woza Afrika...
...Running in double bill with Ma-Dladla's Beat was a one-act even more typical of the old mode: Bergville Stories, written and directed by Duma Ndlovu, creator of the original Woza Afrika...
...Umabatha provides an almost eerie ex perience to the non-Zulu speaker who knows Macbeth...
...Either the work must reveal society to itself, perhaps motivating it to change, or else it must beam a light onto its path...
...South African playwrights aspired to challenge, educate, and, in some mystical way, empower their audiences, and by so doing to strike a blow against the country's regime...
...Exotic and terribly familiar, fantastic and inevitable, the newer play puts the viewer in the position of the witches, able to predict ghosts, murder, and madness from the vantage of a completely different reality...
...I$ 7 ment when, aiming to charm a discriminatory landlord, Goodyear donned sunglasses, a baseball jacket, and an absurdly charming grin, and swaggered up to the door claiming to be an American black (die-hard South African "racialists" have often regarded African-Americans as honorary whites...
...It will be worth waiting until the mirror and the lamp brighten again, revealing the landscape that change has shaped...
...The rich are still rich, the poor still poor," chanted actress Delly Malinga, wearing red leg warmers, as she recalled a Zulu protest march with the jogging dance steps habitually used by South African demonstrators...
...With its domestic vignettes veering off toward panoramas of a society in flux, Ma-Dladla's Beat had the zeal and rather heavy sincerity of an earlier theatrical era...
...Some artists, too, resented the pressure to launch an anti-authoritarian skirmish on every single stage...
...series...
...the widespread conviction of playwrights, directors, and actors that their work could change society made theater contagiously exciting...
...series...
...Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth, written in 1969 by Welcome Msomi, transposes the story of Macbeth to nineteenth-century Zululand, following Shakespeare's text closely without being a translation...
...That, overall, the Woza Afrika...
...Once a Pirate (directed by Lara Foot) touched on serious issues-racial injustice, the global village's stealth attack on traditional African culture-but defused them with humor, as in the motW C o inswnrrril 2 8 w•l'lr,rnfrrr 1...
...The Lincoln Center Festival's object, in mounting a new Woza Afrika...
...History has swept away apartheid's most obvious outrages, and the formerly stark moral chiaroscuro has absorbed the spectrum of gray...
...But in the "old" South Africa it did, and the atmosphere could be intoxicating...
...n: •i;:h:Africanone-act While Men With 1'V'eaftmns, might have been the catalyst for the Woza Afrika...
...In the Johannesburg Civic Theater's spectacular production, directed by the author, Umabatha proved to be the highlight of the South African tenancy at Lincoln Center...
...It is surely noaccident, for example, that all the actors moved with an ease and extravagance of gesture rarely seen on an American stage...
...0 The American Association of University Professors Invites You to a Fall Conference at the Midland Hotel in downtown Chicago October 24-26, 1997 Academic Freedom at Religiously Affiliated Institutions Keynote Address by Martin Marty Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago Closing Plenary Address by George Marsden Author of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship Bringing together faculty members, administrators, and anyone interested in the impact of an institution's religious affiliation on aspects of academic freedom, the conference is planned as a response to widespread interest in how religion affects academia...
...Blame for the country's ongoing problems-vast inequities in wealth, high unemployment, crime, and vicious cycles of violence, for example-is less easy to place...
...One sensed the artists' struggle to find new meaning after the dissolution of certainty...
...For more information, please call AAUP at 202-737-5900, send e-mail to jalger@aaup.org, or visit AAUP's Web site at http://www.igc.apc.org/aaup/ Commonweal 29 September 12, 1997...
...Entangled as American thespians can be in discourse about funding woes, the kitsch factor on Broadway, or financial squabbles like the recent lawsuit over the Rc1N profits, it may be difficult for us to imagine a situation where theater seems urgent...
...In the beguiling comic sketches of Paul Slabolepszv's Once a Piratr, forexample, Seputla Sebogodi...
...From an evocation of a mass hanging, to the pageantry of Zulu warriors, to a sketch of a Nike delivery truck hijacked with a banana, the images from these South African plays responded to the tantalizing question: Where can the country's theater go now that apartheid is dead...
...All around me the cracks begin to appear," murmured a frightened army officer, forced to reexamine his convictions, in White Men with Weapons...
...festival was not completely exhilarating was certainly understandable...
...From an aesthetic point of view, in any case, protest theater's effects were less significant than its premise...
...It is not surprising that the plays at Lincoln Center seemed to be groping through these new conditions...
...series presented at this summer's Lincoln Center Festival...
...Perhaps all theater audiences have this illusion of augury to a certain extent, a result of sharing the characters' temporal and spatial frame in a way that a book or movie does not permit...
...Ghosts in traditional African masks stalked through smoke seeping from the pots of the three sangomas (witch doctors-Msomi's version of the witches), and warriors in Zulu dress rallied and fought against colorsaturated backdrops...
...The works of Athol Fugard, the musical Sara fun!, ,and other exportsincluding the plays that found their way to the original Woxa Afrika...
...While Magi Nonzini Williams's one-character play Ma-Dladla's Beat, about a resilient woman's struggle to make ends meet, focused on themes like marriage and motherhood, it didn't shrink from socioeconomics...
...In the world of South African theater, the recent selection of plays suggests, the mirror has misted and the lamp shines at a lower wattage...
...Set in one of South Africa's violence-plagued black townships, Bergville Stories portrayed a confrontation between locals (presumably supporters of the African National Congress) and a worker hostel's Zulu residents (presumably suspected of supporting the Zulu-dominated political party Inkatha...
...Despite its grim depiction of a mass execution, Bergville Stories ended on a note of hope with stirring choruses by the allmale cast capitalizing upon an infectiously triumphant musical tradition...
...This was particularly evident in the three one-person shows, whose apparently inexhaustible actors conjured scenes and people out of nothing...
...And perhaps this sense of privilege makes protest theater especially exhilarating, as audiences feel themselves governing the future...
...series during Lincoln Center's 198E-87 season-acquainted American audiences with a dramatic tradition that aimed far beyond entertainment...
...Glimmers of protest-theater urgency did brighten this summer's Woxa Afrika: After Apartheid...
...series composed of recent plays, was to show how South African dramatists feel, so to speak, on the morning after...
...playing the fanatical soccer fan Goodyear Mamabolo, created a whole stadium out of an icecream cooler and a bouncing orange...
...This lone fragment of set, drawing attention to the invisible township around the besieged hostel, emphasized the role of the audience's imagination-paralleling, in some ways, the creative work of South Africans bringing a new society into being...
...Creative works that wander outside the art-for-art's sake encampment must subscribe to one end of the old dichotomy: art as mirror, or as lamp...
...A similarly humorous approach guided White Men with Weapons, actor and writer Greig Coetzee's hilarious satire of his months in the South African Defense Force (directed by Garth Anderson...
...With the cultural boycott an obstacle to the staging of foreign plays, it was sometimes difficult to find a South African production that did not deal with politics, Critics, back in the old dispensation, might carp that "protest" plays preached to the converted, soothing the consciencesof liberal audiences, often largely white, with a few hours of token moral indignation...
...Other productions hewed more closely to the protest theater model...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 15
