theatre
Matthew Krouse
In the heart of Hillbrow, on Saturday June 20, the creme of Johannesburg’s gay intelligensia sat alongside their ordinary city counterparts, anticipating the first performance of a long-awaited play, emanating from unexpected quarters.
The Harrison Reef Hotel, where the performance was to take place, is legendary. Home to Johannesburg’s oldest gay bar, it is here in a reception room on the seventh floor, in 1994, that the late preacher Tsietsi Thandekiso began his Hope and Unity Metropolitan Community Church – a spiritual anchor for many of the city’s lesbians and gays. And it is the young members of his congregation who have contributed their stories to make the play.
Called After Nines, the title refers to a time when gay people could only lead normal lives in the dark hours of night. It’s a simple story in which a youth called Lebo is cast out of home to wander the lonely Hillbrow streets. Her salvation comes about when her gay and lesbian ancestors appear to her in a vision, ultimately providing Lebo with enough purpose to carry on.
Like any community drama, After Nines is played on a bare stage with little fuss and bother. And though the form may hold no surprises, there are some pioneering elements to the production. For example, the Hillbrow performance, as well as subsequent performances at the Yeoville Recreation Centre, Sibikwa Centre in Benoni and at the Vereeneging Civic Theatre, have functioned as fundraisers for a host of groups, including the gay bursary fund of the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality.
While the community has seen many cultural fundraisers over the years, After Nines is probably the first truly grassroots production hoping to attract a city-based black, gay audience. All very authentic indeed.
The idea of using testimony as drama is not new. Previous decades and cultural milieus have used real stories, told by real people, to convey the often painful truths about their lives. Last year in particular, After Nines’s director Robert Colman’s moving piece about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission -The story I am about to tell – was something of a breakthrough for the rather dowdy category of “Community Theatre”.
While both pieces are pretty down beat, their intense originality stems from their settings: the city streets. In other words, what community theatre has experienced in the last couple of years is a flight from politics to a new realism. A form of cup-and-saucer docu- drama.
Initial funding for After Nines came from the Gay and Lesbian Archives (Gala) – now an integral part of the South African History archives at Wits University – as part of their mission to make gay stories known as widely as possible.
So when its first audience gathered among the Seventies’ tack of the Harrison Reef Hotel, it was as a result of more than enough investment on the part of the pink rand. And nobody was disappointed.
Colman, now a leading light of community drama, must have done something right because, no sooner had the play been presented in Hillbrow, when it was schlepped to the Gay Games in Amsterdam. Performances there included two Amnesty International human rights events, in the hub of the biggest gay sporting event in history.
Given the success of the production, it’s not surprising that it should garner a run at a mainstream theatre in town. Thus, people seeking out unique cultural combinations should take themselves off to the Pieter Roos theatre at Johannesburg’s Civic, to find out what really happened to Lebo the lesbian when she met her gay forbears, somewhere along the way.
@Starry eyes
TH Watkins BILLIONS AND BILLIONS by Carl Sagan (Headline)
Carl Sagan was an optimist to the end, hoping that science, to which he had devoted his life, would be able to give him life for a few more years. He hoped as well that the nations of the world would somehow transcend human cussedness and the iron weight of history to build a future in which they would not blow one another off the face of the earth – or so corrupt the planet that there would be no real reason to hang around.
He was wrong in the first hope, dying of pneumonia after two years of exhaustive therapy for a rare blood disease. It remains to be seen whether the second hope was better founded.
Arguably, Sagan was the greatest populariser of science in modern times. His famously successful Cosmos television series, his frequent television appearances and 10 books spread him across the cultural landscape. This tended to earn Sagan disdain among some of his fellow scientists. But what could not be gainsaid was his consistent defense of scientific inquiry, his relentless campaign to increase funding for space research, and, to end the possibility of nuclear war and stave off environmental collapse. Sagan used the spotlight of his fame to illuminate the abyss into which stupidity, greed, and the lust for power may yet dump us.
All of those interests and causes are handsomely represented in Billions and Billions, subtitled Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. Some of the material is new, some of it was previously published in Parade magazine, and one chapter is a speech.
As in most such collections, there is an eclectic character to Billions and Billions as it wanders from the mechanics of light waves to the often paradoxical dicta of human social behavior. What ties the book together is a devotion to life so fierce that Sagan found it almost impossible not to dream of its existence beyond this lonely cinder called earth.
Sagan was aware of how easily we human beings could destroy our planet and thus ourselves. He knew how stubbornly we cling to the convictions and traditions that can kill us. Yet he chose as his last testament a declaration of hope that we still have time to mend our ways.