Run of the Mill Theater Mines The Extraordinary Output Of Early 1970s Athol Fugard and the South African Theater He Helped Shape
When Jenny Tibbels and David Mitchell resolved to organize a South African Play Festival in Baltimore, they decided to build the six-week event around a pivotal moment in the history of South African theater--a pivotal moment, in fact, for all of English-language theater. Tibbels, the artistic director of Baltimore’s Run of the Mill Theater, and Mitchell, the group’s managing director, reached back to 1967, when the Serpent Players, a small, barely professional troupe of actors in Port Elizabeth, took a new approach to their work.
He gave the actors a premise--a political activist giving his wife his most valuable possession, a coat, just before going to prison for five years, or a young man carrying a bomb into a police station. As the actors developed the situations, Fugard took copious notes, distilling spontaneous talk into dialogue, organizing invented scenes into a dramatic structure. He was less than a dictator, more than a secretary; he was an active collaborator with the actors. The results were two one-acts, "The Coat" and "Orestes."
A few years later Fugard showed his two favorite actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, an odd photograph of a man holding a cigarette in one hand and a pipe in the other. How could such a strange picture come into being?
The two actors and the playwright went to work and developed the story of a professional photographer in the black township of New Brighton, just outside Port Elizabeth. Kani was Styles, the picture taker, and Ntshona was Sizwe Bansi, the picture subject, a man planning to fake his own death to escape apartheid's racial ID laws. When Sizwe Bansi Is Dead opened in Cape Town in 1972, the writing credit was shared by all three men: Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona.
"Because the work came out of improvisation it demonstrated the idea that even writing can be a collaboration, a way of bringing people together," Tibbels says. "Because the work grew out of improvisation, the plays addressed the particulars of human stories, and the politics arose from the stories, not the other way around. This wasn't message theater; this wasn't the bald statement that `apartheid is bad.' This was life as it was lived under apartheid. It didn't provide answers; it provoked questions. That's important because questions make you think, and situations like apartheid can occur only when you stop thinking."
In 1973 Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona used the same kind of improvisation to co-write "The Island," based on Robben Island, the isolated prison camp where Nelson Mandela was interned for more than 20 years. "The Island" will not be part of the festival, but it is a crucial piece of this theatrical revolution, which also yielded 1974's Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. Full productions of Sizwe Bansi and Statements form the centerpiece of this South African Play Festival.
During this fecund period, Fugard obtained six photographs the South African police had taken when they arrested a white woman and a "coloured" man in the act of making love. The playwright became obsessed with what happened before and between those pictures. Using the techniques he had learned from his collaborations with Kani and Ntshona, he wrote a script called Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. It was the story of a love affair between a single white librarian and a married "coloured" school principal, a relationship that was troubled nearly as much by internal tensions as by external pressures.
"Not only was this a show about an illegal act," Tibbels says. "The show itself was an illegal act, because white performers and black performers were forbidden by law to even be onstage together. These people were willing to risk going to jail to do their art, so you know they were putting it on the line. The fact that these actors and writers came together to make political theater in a place where political theater wasn't allowed is so inspiring."
Statements was radical not only in content but also in form. It takes place in the dim light of a library; the only necessary props are the librarian's blanket and the police officer's flashlight. All the emphasis is placed on the actors, whose voices and bodies create the story without need of expensive production values.
This approach grew out of necessity--a quasi-legal troupe could hardly do much fundraising--but also out of philosophy. Fugard had been reading Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's "Towards a Poor Theatre," an argument that theater shouldn't compete with the cinema's spectacle because it can't. Instead theater should focus on the basics.
"You can have all the smoke and mirrors in the world, but if the actors aren't connecting to the audience, it doesn't matter," Tibbels says. "Fugard and his actors connected with people. They made something out of nothing for 20 years. That's what we're trying to do with the Run of the Mill Theater in Baltimore. Like the Serpent Players, we're poor in economic resources but rich in human resources. By concentrating on the actors onstage, we believe we can make something out of nothing, too."
Run of the Mill doesn't even have its own space. The company has presented productions in the Meadow Mill complex, at Loyola College, and now at Theatre Project. The troupe appeared likely to fold when its founder and original artistic director, James Knipple, was accepted to a graduate program in directing at University of California, Irvine. But he refused to let the company's momentum falter and recruited Tibbels and Mitchell to take over the reins. Tibbels was living in Manhattan at the time, making the endless rounds of auditions.
"New York's a city where it's difficult to tap into resources, because space is so limited, grants are so competitive, and the business is so cutthroat," Tibbels says. "I had been in 10 productions over three years, but it was frustrating because I was always waiting on somebody else. Why can't I make my own work? I thought. Why can't I work with other people to make art together?
"In January of this year, Jim Knipple called me and said, `What are you doing?' I said, "I'm spinning my wheels.' He said, `Why don't you come home? This company in Baltimore wants you, and if you take over as artistic director, you'll always be able to work.' I was falling in love with a guy from Baltimore, so I decided to come back."
Tibbels, now 29, had been a 9-year-old girl living on an 11-acre spread in Clarksville when her parents decided to give up their comfortable, rural lifestyle and move into a three-story rowhouse in Baltimore's inner-city Sandtown neighborhood. Her father, Allan Tibbels, had been a businessman and director of Youth for Christ in Howard County, but now he felt called to start the New Song Community Church in Sandtown. The family moved in 1986, the church opened in 1988, and they helped launch the Habitat for Humanity Sandtown project in 1989. In 1991, his wife, Susan Tibbels, founded the New Song Academy in the neighborhood.
"It was really hard to be an outsider," Tibbels admits now. "At that age, you want to fit in, and it was obvious I didn't fit in. I was thrown out of my comfort zone at an early age and forced to learn a whole new set of social skills. It wasn't my choice, but eventually I learned to embrace it. Outsiders would look at my neighborhood and say, `That's such a dangerous place.' My friends from St. Paul's School weren't allowed to come visit me. But I had just as many friends in the neighborhood and I felt like I belonged there.
"At the same time, I often felt caught between the African-American and white cultures. But when I started acting, I found the stage was the one place I could be myself. Onstage, I could just be the character, and that allowed me to express emotions I couldn't otherwise."
When she studied theater at Eastern College outside Philadelphia, Tibbels decided to spend her senior semester abroad in Cape Town. This was 1998, just four years after the apartheid regime had crumbled and Mandela had been elected president. In addition to taking classes in the Xhosa language and the history of South African theater, Tibbels researched, wrote, and staged a docudrama about residents who had been forcibly removed from an integrated neighborhood. She also got a chance to meet John Kani himself.
"He was artistic director of the Market Theater, which represents the pinnacle of what I'd like to do in theater," Tibbels says. "It's theater that speaks to things that are happening in society because it's necessary to speak that way. But it was also a physical theater, a whole-body theater, with lots of music and movement, much like the services at the New Song Community Church. When I met Kani, though, he was very matter of fact; he just said, `This is the work that needs to be done.'"
The intense collaborations with Kani and the other actors between 1967 and '74 changed Fugard forever as a writer. That transformation made possible his mature masterpieces: A Lesson From Aloes, Master Harold . . . and the Boys, The Road to Mecca, and My Children! My Africa! It made the playwright a world figure and made South Africa a theater hotbed.
To showcase Fugard's heirs, the South African Play Festival presents not just Sizwe Bansi and Statements but also readings of five new scripts from the country. IVirgin Boy is by Peter Krummick, whose Bonhoeffer was recently staged at Theatre Project. The other shows include Lara Newton's Hear and Now, Lueen Conning's A Coloured Place, Reeza de Wit's Crossings, and Duma Ndlovu and G. Holtz's Black Codes From the Underground.
Tibbels, who earned her master's in acting from Columbia University, is now teaching theater at Towson University and Roland Park Country School as she devotes herself to building Run of the Mill into a local theatrical force. She recently became engaged to Darryl Jordan, a fellow teacher and a singer with the Soulful Symphony.
"My fiancé is African-American, but our situation is very different from the one in Statements," she says. "Nonetheless, we do run into people who disapprove of interracial relationships, so I can bring some of my own experience to directing the show. Dealing with something so personal forces me out of my comfort zone, and that's where the most interesting work comes from.
"I'm interested in how to stage intimacy on a public stage. In the story, the private relationship becomes a public event when they are arrested, and I'm interested in how jarring that shift can be. It's a theme that resonates with me now that privacy and civil liberties are under assault both here in the U.S. and abroad."
