How much can you expect from a one-person play performed on an almost bare stage? Usually not much, but it's magic, sheer magic when it's ACT's current production of "The Syringa Tree."
One-person theatrical productions have become more frequent in these days of enormous staging costs. A one-person play requires a great deal less capital to mount, and regional theaters around the country rely on them to bolster the bottom line. Too often these productions do more for the theater's finances than they do for the audiences. Such is not the case with "The Syringa Tree."
This is a tender yet aching story about the personal cost to all of us of sanctioned prejudice. Set in South Africa during the last decades of apartheid, it speaks to citizens of every country in which privilege is based on skin color, religion or ethnicity.
It's a topic that too often is treated on stage as a message to be hammered into the audience's consciousness. Yet this play doesn't preach. Instead, its concepts reveal themselves through the reactions of a little white girl trying to make sense out of what's going on in the world around here. Sometimes the innocent child who simply witnesses has more wisdom than the worldly adult who makes things happen.
Lizzie is 5 when the play opens in the 1960s, living a favored life in Johannesburg as the child of a Jewish doctor and Catholic mother, both of whom have long, deep family roots in South Africa. Salamina, the Xhosa woman who is Lizzie's beloved nanny, is very pregnant when the play opens.
The daughter she delivers, Maliseng, becomes a secret younger sister to Lizzie. She must be secret because South African law forbids people without papers to live outside their homelands. Baby Maliseng would be sent to Soweto if the police were aware of her presence.
As little Lizzie grows to adulthood before our eyes, we meet her neighbors, her grandparents, other of the family servants and a cast of characters that numbers about two dozen. They are all performed by a single actor. The role is shared by two women who play it on alternating nights. On opening night Gin Hammond provided a bravura performance.
Both she and Eva Kaminsky have starred in this play before in such prestigious venues as Longwharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and California's Pasadena Playhouse. If Kaminsky is even nearly as good as Hammond, you can expect a momentous experience whatever night you go.
With gesture, accent and intonation Hammond believably switches from "pickaninny" toddler to dour and bigoted Afrikaner religious leader, from gracious English liberal to reserved Zulu chauffeur. Each character is fully embodied; we can "see" them all on the stage. Yet the actor never changes costume, never adds a prop.
So, too, can we "see" the South African countryside even though the set has been deliberately created as an exercise in minimalism. The stage is bare except for a child's swing suspended from above. It hangs in front of a backlit backdrop on which wide strokes of color change to suit the mood of the play. On it is a large, flowering tree branch - the syringa tree of the title. Designed by Kenneth Foy, the setting works beautifully.
Through the ingenious lighting effects of Steven B. Mannshardt, this set blazes with the dawning sun at one moment, is infused with the gold of sunset at another. In moonlight it can be the frightening venue of a police chase, or the inviting locale of a convivial campfire.
These images are reinforced by the sounds designed by Tony Suraci. The noise of rustling underbrush, musical notes, a rapping on a door, automobile tires, a gunshot, children's games, all enter our consciousness and help shape the scene we create in our own minds.
Written by Pamela Gien, who grew up in South Africa, the play is semiautobiographical. Gien wrote it as fiction because she wanted it to transcend the personal and address more profoundly the idea of freedom and human dignity. She succeeds brilliantly and was awarded the Obie for best play in 2001. She was also the play's first actor and won awards for her performance as well.
"The Syringa Tree" has played to sold-out houses across the United States, in England and other international venues. It's satisfying to know that it was first performed here in Seattle, in ACT's Bullitt Cabaret in 1999. Larry Moss was the director then; he has returned to Seattle to direct the current production. It was Moss who first encouraged Gien to write "The Syringa Tree."
This is a one-act play that runs more than 90 minutes. Be prepared, and you'll be amply rewarded.
Its return to ACT is a gift to the community. We almost lost ACT Theatre last year. Let us rejoice in the fact that it is still with us.
Freelance writer Nancy Worssam is a Magnolia resident. She can be reached at qanews@nwlink.com
