Evening Music

Rockwell Matters

May 12, 2008
 
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In recent weeks I came across two performances of South Africana: Pieter-Dirk Uys’s “Elections and Erections” at American Repertory Theater’s newish small stage at Harvard and the revival of “Sizwe Banzi is Dead” at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn. Both had their merits and demerits, but for me they also awakened memories of my own involvement in South African drama a decade ago.
 
Uys is South Africa’s best-known, most beloved Boer anti-Apartheid AIDS activist drag queen. This might not seem a particularly expansive category in which to claim pre-eminence, but Uys really is a wonderfully brave and talented man. Funny, too, but there’s where it gets complicated.
 
His problem is that he operates most comfortably within his native context. His imitations of and satiric references to South African politicians of whatever party and color, their pomposities and eccentricities and sometimes criminal stupidities, are funny to an American audience and hilarious to a South African one. But when he ventures into cracks about George Bush or Hillary Clinton, he loses his edge.
 
“Sizwe Banzi is Dead” is a rambling but still trenchant comedy about the resilient, fractured lives of black under Apartheid. It was written – assembled improvisationally, perhaps? – back in 1972 by the white writer Athold Fugard and the black actors John Kani (who co-founded the courageous Market Theatre in Johannesburg) and Winston Ntshona. They have performed it exclusively ever since, and this is their farewell to it, which makes sense since Ntshona, while still boasting a fabulously vaudevillian funny face, is getting on.
 
My connection to all this dates back to 1997, when I traveled South Africa for 10 days with Anne Cattaneo, dramaturge of the Lincoln Center Theater, to select plays for a mini South African drama festival I presented that summer at the Lincoln Center Festival. We had lunch with Uys in his and his partner’s home in Darling, north of Cape Town, though it didn’t work out to bring him that summer. We did meet with Kani in Johnnesburg, and I did bring a strong play by Aubrey Sekhabi, who directed the current revival of “Sizwe Banzi is Dead.”
 
The plays that summer were pretty wonderful, if I do say so myself. The critics agreed, but the public stubbornly refused to come. At the time I believed that was because American audiences had lost interest in South Africa once the battle against Apartheid had been won. The BAM audiences for “Sizwe Banzi” this spring were bigger, suggesting that their marketing now is better than our marketing was then.
 
In the end, though, art must appeal on its own terms, not simply be piggy-backed onto moral causes. It can only be healthy that South African arts can now be appreciated as the products of an important country with a vital theatrical tradition of its own.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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