Chicago has had a long association with Pulitzer Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wile Soyinka’s best-known play “Death and the King’s Horseman, ” having initially produced it with Soyinka himself directing back it here less than a year after it was first published in 1975. Since that time, the work has become a curriculum standard in African- and African-American-based high school and college courses but is a work that is more often analyzed and respected than actually performed. That’s a pity, for as this inaugural production of the new Fehinty African Theatre Ensemble demonstrates, a quality staging of the piece communicates its collision of traditional tribal and colonial cultures in a way that allows audiences to experience on an immediate and visceral level. Director Michael Singletary uses two sometimes roaring, sometimes gently caressed Yoruba “talking” drums to narrate the work and serve as a symbol of a disappearing tribal world that is “tumbling into a void of strangers,” i.e., British colonialism, whose representatives refer to the native population as “savages” and even the “n” word who “always speak in riddles.” Indeed, the work’s ability to communicate the Yoruba worldview via its cosmological and allegorical prose style transposed to English is part of its genius, but the European ethos of entitlement, expansionism and cultural chauvinism is also portrayed with amazing lucidity, the horseman employing a British diplomat to, “speak clearly, white man.” Part of the power of this production is that the audience is allowed to enter into both worlds so effectively that the climactic clash and tragedy that unfolds becomes all the more potent. This is a short run and even the work’s opening had only a handful of audience members, a shame for such a quality effort with so much heart and so much to share. (Dennis Polkow)
The Beauty Myth: A Review of "School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play" at Goodman Theatre Set in 1986 in the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Ghana, five teenagers gossip and primp as they prepare for beauty pageant auditions the following day. The social hierarchy of "mean girls'' is quickly established, as Paulina, the prettiest and best singer, alternately boasts about her superiority and denigrates her classmates for what she considers their inferiority.
