Presenting the Past, Performing the Future

Abstract

The ten-year anniversary of the end of apartheid brought a wave of South African theater to New York. A city that had not seen a major production from that country since Athol Fugard's Sorrows and Rejoicings in early 2002 suddenly had a surfeit of drama new and old by the beginning months of 2004. At Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater in December, John Kani's Nothing But the Truth told of apartheid's lingering specter even after a decade of democracy. That same month, LaMaMa, one of downtown New York's premier avant garde venues, played host to a South African production of Woza Albert!, Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon's famous parable of Christ's second coming in the apartheid-ridden nation. Uptown at Barnard College's Minor Latham Playhouse, Lara Foot Newton, the former Associate Artistic Director for Johannesburg's Market Theatre, presented The Well Being, a fable of devastation and recovery in rural South Africa. In April of 2003, the Brooklyn Academy of Music revived Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's The Island, about life on Cape Town's infamous Robben Island Prison. Fugard's earlier play Master Harold … and the Boys opened for a limited run on Broadway a month later. In Cape Town, however, the dawn 2004 was not a moment for the kind of pointed political drama presented in America. The legislative capital's three major theaters – the newly-built International Convention Centre, downtown's Artscape (formerly the Nico Theatre Centre), and the Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town – played home to what might seem like entertainment pure and simple: a play from Shakespeare, an American musical, a dance revue, and a slapstick comedy. But underneath the singing and pratfalls lay a commentary on the direction the new South Africa must take in the years to come. Though Cape Town's theater offerings may seem at first more frivolous than those in New York, taken together they present a compelling picture of a city and a nation trying to lay out a course for its second decade of democracy.