Playwright: Athol Fugard
At: Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln
Telephone: 773-871-3000; $20-$30
Runs through: June 10
Athol Fugard's My Children, My Africa is built on monologues; pleas, whispers, shouts and fire-breathing calls to action against the apartheid of 1984 South Africa. Within the impassioned polemics that power the three-character drama, there's one that stands out as both a virtuosic piece of writing and an incendiary bit of acting.
Beethovan Oden plays Thami, the beloved prize pupil of Clarence Gilyard's Mr. M, a teacher in a Black South African high school whose prison-like buildings rot while the nearby white high school gleams with up-to-date textbooks and shiny new facilities. Thami has always been an exemplary student, but with the gradually building monologue that closes Act I, we see him channel all the energy he once poured into book learning toward revolutionary radicalism. He has learned enough to be angry enough to want to destroy the infrastructure of the oppressive system that governs his country, by any means necessary. If it takes arson and rioting rather than well-crafted rhetoric to destroy that system, well, so be it.
We see Thami's evolution from dutiful schoolboy to uncompromising revolutionary as he talks about his family life, virtually choking on bile as describes watching his mother come crawling back home every day after hours spent scrubbing while people's floors. She's one of the 'lucky ones' he says bitterly; at least she has a job. Oden builds to a searing crescendo in the monologue, ensuring that when the lights go down at the close of the act, the mood is one of burning silence—the kind of silence that comes right before an annihilating explosion.
Fugard's script is problematic in its dependence on monologues, but the strength of actors, directed by Cecil O'Neal to performances that cover the emotional spectrum from understated subtly to inflamed cries, prevents the production from becoming bogged down in speechifying.
Gilyard, whose dignified depths shine to the surface, exudes nobility in his unwavering insistence that 'real leaders, not rabble-rousers' will be South Africa's deliverance from apartheid. He's got a face that evokes the wisdom of Solomon and the carriage of a king, even as he's attacked for a stance that his students view as misguided at best and as a betrayal punishable by death at worst. It's a portrayal of depth and strength that Gilyard never had a chance to hint at in his seven seasons as Chuck Norris' sidekick on the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger or his supporting roles in the films Die Hard and Top Gun. We can all be thankful he left television and movies in order to dive into more substantial fare.
As Isabel, Blair Robertson holds her own against Gilyard and Oden, imbuing her character with the conflicted, frustrated depths of a young woman who learns the hard way that idealistic intellectualizing is no match for brutal oppression.