>From Shopping and Fucking to Fugard in New York, director Yael Farber has been on a roller coaster ride, and she’s not about to get off, writes Charl Blignaut
`It seems like insomnia isn’t just a Jo’burg thing,” says Yael Farber’s too-awake voice down the line from New York. It’s the middle of the night in a city that never sleeps and she’s playing at the computer. “I’m stressed,” says Farber. “We’re working like dogs to get the next project off the ground.” Like always.
Although she’s clearly happy to be tracked down, she’s not sure whether to laugh or squirm at the suggestion that she’s in the throes of a “budding international theatre career”.
“For Christ’s sake,” she chastises, “I’m living on bagels, I can barely afford a subway token every day, my back aches from months of couch habitation, and any exciting [career] possibilities about as stable as Oprah Winfrey’s weight at this stage.”
Of course, she’s being strung-out and way too modest. I mean, if you’re going to suffer from insomnia it may as well be in New York, and if you’re going to sleep on the couch let it at least be on Robert Redford’s daughter’s couch.
And anyway, just two nights back the 28-year- old Farber witnessed the close of a limited run of her New York directorial debut.
For the past eight months, Farber – easily one of the most exciting directing talents to emerge in South Africa in ages – has been on a learning curve that feels more like a roller coaster. It’s a ride that started during the run of her massively popular Johannesburg production of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Farber had to sever the cord and leave her cast to cope alone on the second night of their run, flying to New York and a director’s workshop at the Lincoln Theatre.
The play went on to shake the Market Theatre’s box office and then stir the FNB/Vita Award judges. Farber went on to Ireland and a much-needed break, “long evenings in village pubs”, time at the Dublin Theatre Festival and then on to Galway to work with the Druid Theatre Company, a group that did to the Tony Awards last year what Shopping and Fucking did to the Vitas back home.
Then in February, Farber received a call that was to cause her to drop everything she was doing and head back to Manhattan: “When New York shakes her sexy arse at you, there are just no decisions to be pondered.”
The call was from Darrill Rosen, a South African actor living in New York. He and a close friend, Amy Redford, had put together a deal for a limited run of Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye, a bleak and relentless working-class drama set in a kitchen in apartheid Port Elizabeth. The play was first produced by the Lunar Stage upstate in New Jersey and then by Redford for a three-week run at the back end of Broadway.
Since my “budding international career” comment, Farber is quick to kill any vestige of romance I might still harbour. “The theatre was a dive – in the best possible way – on the corner of Broadway and Canal. It was up four flights of stairs. There was a dance studio above us that stomped their way through most of our meaningful pauses. I worked the lights and they flickered with every pirouette.”
Three weeks were all they could get; Fugard’s agents were fearful of over-subscribing one of the world’s most frequently-performed playwrights. “The word playwright is so apt for him,” says Farber, unable to downplay her excitement, “he has wrought his plays. The writing is so honest you can’t get away with jack-shit.”
The response to the play was positive, even in Farber terms.
>From Robert Redford – who popped by to see it and was “generous and extremely sensitive to the detail of the production” – to lesser mortals, who were “either totally freaked out or totally moved”.
“It’s the rawness of the story,” she says. “People were astounded by the beauty of the writing and the commitment of the performers. There was, however, the occassional concern that Amy and Darrill didn’t look `pretty’ enough – I shit you not. What can you say to that? South Africans are not very pretty, Auntie.”
Right now the thing keeping Farber fired is a new project with South African blues singer and actor Thembi Mtshali. Mtshali recently went to Washington to test the waters and promptly landed herself a role in Steven Spielberg’s doomsday epic Final Impact. When Farber heard Mtshali was in Washington, she called up to suggest a new project and now it’s the middle of the night and she can’t sleep all over again.
Even though they haven’t yet cleared through all the red tape, Farber and Mtshali are acting in faith. This week they’re off to Vermont together to develop a script which Farber assures me will be “very South African” and very woman. What’s really keeping her up tonight is not the kuns, but the funding.A leading New York theatre has expressed interest in the project – “If the funding comes through” – and Farber wants to bring the work back to the Grahamstown festival in July if she can. So she waits.
In September, meanwhile, she has been invited to Amsterdam and a young director’s season at the deeply respected DasArts centre. So much for budding and international …