Content area
Full Text
TSHEPANG. Written and directed by Lara Foot Newton. Duckrabbit Productions, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 15 September 2006.
Theatre that brings us the horrific has always struggled with form to fit its content. but good storytelling has modes of moving through time and character that accommodate the violence of our darkest stories. In its purest forms, a single storyteller can create a relationship with the audience that bends to play out our resistances to hard tales. Lara Foot Newton's contemporary South African tale, Tshepang, uses a man who tells stories as the only speaking character in this two-character play about the brutal rape of a nine-month-old girl in rural South Africa. Inspired by the highly publicized infant rape of a child, known as baby Tshepang, the play is Foot Newton's response to this rape and to hundreds of stories of other such violations that flooded South Africa after the baby Tshepang case.
Bearing the weight of the theatrical event, Mncedise Shabangu as Simon proves a winning choice for a difficult role. Shabangu opens the play with a direct conversational style that likely elicited a warmer reaction in Africa than that received at Williams College from a buttoned-up audience less accustomed to the free play of call and response. Marking the flexibility of both text and performer, this unrequited conversational gambit was gracefully repaired. by the end of the evening, the audience had joined this...