#Ferial Haffajee
`I’ve got an aunty like that!” hooted a member of the audience at a recent Johannesburg performance of A Coloured Place, the side-splitting play that has brought its twentysomething writer/director Lueen Conning into the cultural limelight.
Side-splitting, that is, until you think a little and then the reflection sets in. “It’s too close to home,” said another guest at the Civic Theatre, where Conning kicked off the national tour of her play.
The play has attracted consistently huge audiences for its three runs at the Playhouse in Durban. Penned by Conning for Durban’s Southern Life Playhouse Company women’s arts festival two years ago, it tackles the holy, thorny cow of coloured identity.
Everybody who grew up in a coloured area may not have an aunty like Evette (played energetically by Crystal Tryon) but we all know one. From her checked blue gown, slippers and cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth to her forceful opinions and fondness for a five-litre of wine, Evette is an Everywoman. Stuck in a rut of self-constructed walls, she laments her cold husband, boring friends and her frustrated ambition.
A Coloured Place is a play about stepping out and looking in the mirror. “I thought a lot about a mirror when I was writing the play,” says the casually dressed 27-year-old playwright who sports dreadlocks. “I wanted to say to coloured people: `Let’s reflect. Let’s ask the questions’.” The questions she raises are about identity, teenage pregnancy, stereotyping and hair.
Yes, hair. Hair and the coloured woman are inextricably knotted together. From a young age, we do battle with our hair – rolling it, swirling it and straightening it. That’s if you’re born with kroes (kinky) hair and not gladdes, slang for straight, glossy hair. In the old days, women used a torture-like instrument called a hot iron, to literally iron out the kinks.
Conning says the segment in the play about hair is fiercely autobiographical – now she’s come to terms with her hair and herself. Her career as an artist started early with the ballet classes she began when she was six years old and the poetry she started writing two years later.
For Conning, poetry comes before directing. She is trying to get two anthologies published. To earn a living, she also works as a scriptwriter and art project manager.
She has spent the past year working at the Robben Island museum. Her first boat trip to work at Robben Island was the first time she left the continent.
Earlier travel plans were thwarted when she fell pregnant at 19 with her son Raine. Negotiations with the Julliard School in New York were going well, but that dream was put aside and she studied instead at Natal Technikon.
“I believe that my son came into my life at exactly the time he was meant to. He has meant an expansion of myself.”
Conning, Raine and her husband Thulani Ndlovu (a dancer, actor and stuntman) now call Cape Town home. “Leaving home [Durban] was vital. It helped me to let go of my luggage. In a new place, you can define who you are.”
Conning packs a lot of living into life. In addition to a multi-faceted working life, she also experiments with alternative healing, practices Hindu philosophy and some New Age theory.
She is currently working on a new play, but all she’ll give away right now is that it’s a “biography of a South African musician”. Of A Coloured Place, she says: “I was terrified that it would take over my life, that I’d become a coloured writer. There’s such a hunger for someone to articulate these issues.”
It is this very hunger that prompted one of her fans to suggest that Conning get into politics and take up the coloured cause. But, says Conning: “No, thank you! I am an artist. It’s who I am.”