Playwright: Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona. At: Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at the Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-404-7336; $25-$50. Runs through: March
Consider the literary genre known as the "prison play": novels, ballads, and screenplays employing places of internment as their setting commonly portray a broad panorama of the penal system under scrutiny, often going so far as to adopt the guards' viewpoint on occasion. But in prison PLAYS, we meet two, sometimes three, inmates who, for undisclosed reasons, are singled out by unseen warders for especially grueling punishment designed to promote despair. Despite this harsh treatment, however, the detainees are endowed with leisure and energy sufficient to indulge in long conversations and elaborately-staged fantasies, all reflecting their existential dilemma.
Athol Fugard's prison play is set on the infamous Robben Island, off the coast of South Africa, where protesters against the oppressive colonialist rule known as Apartheid were once incarcerated for as long as the authorities dictated. But don't worrythere are no graphic depictions of sadistic cruelty in this production. Indeed, the dramatic action opens on a bare stage, where our heroes, John and Winston, mime repetitive tasks for a full fifteen wordless minutes. And later, we hear that their fellow convicts arethis is based on a true story, so suspend your disbeliefplanning an entertainment in their, uh, spare time, and that John and Winston's contribution to the revel is the trial scene from the Greek tragedy, Antigone.
Well, go ahead and laugh! John does, seeing Winston's tin-can brassiere and raveled-rope wig. So did the audience at the performance I attended. As the would-be impresario cautions his sullen partner, "They laugh at the beginning, but they will listen at the end." And he's right, too. After these comrades have come to terms with the friction generated by the news that John's sentence has been reduced, leaving Winston to anticipate their imminent separation, their presentation of Sophocles' lesson in civil disobedience emerges as a call to arms against the inhumane misapplication of law leading to injusticeswhether in ancient Corinth or modern-day governments.
But what was incendiary to partisan rebels struggling for independence in Cape Town amid the unrest of 1972 cannot hope to achieve the same level of blood-stirring urgency before a crowd of comfortably-distanced Americans in 2010, even granting the exquisite performances ( and razor-keen dialects ) of LaShawn Banks and Kamal Angelo Bolden. Our hindsight awareness, compounded by James Bohnen's Pinteresque direction, is inevitable. But we still listen, notwithstanding. Oh, yesto every word, we listen.