Poor White Rich Girl
Before it hit Kansas City, Pamela Gien’s popular one-woman The Syringa Tree was feted by critics, decorated with awards and generally toasted for being all the noble things it is: a visceral, sentimental play about growing up white and wealthy in apartheid-era Johannesburg, South Africa. Most of this praise applies to its incarnation at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s new Copaken Stage. But we must strike the most defining characteristic — under director Sharon Ott, The Syringa Tree is no longer a one-woman show.
That’s curious, because even with speaking parts spread out among a small, talented cast, the focus remains defiantly I, I, I. Actors step forward for a line or two but rarely get to interact, a clear result of the show’s monologue origin. We get tableaux instead of scenes, an illustrated storybook instead of living drama.
There’s often beauty in the way it hopscotches from memory to memory, and most of the production’s physical aspects are exquisite. The lighting is particularly good, all spilled-blood reds and deep, dark blacks, a hothouse fantasia on a white person’s sentimental yet terrified memories of Africa.
Kate Goehring stars as Elizabeth Grace, who is both our hero and our filter. The script calls Elizabeth “hyper,” and in the opening scenes Goehring narrates in a breathless run-on, bubbling over with nursery rhymes and pidgin nonsense, pinballing about the stage and generally wearing us out. That she grates, at first, seems to be the point. As years pass and the appalling truths of apartheid strip away her naiveté, Elizabeth becomes more appealing.
The play’s most moving passages — and the only ones that seem to benefit from Ott’s full-cast production — concern Elizabeth’s love for Salamina, a black nanny employed by her family. Salamina trusts Elizabeth with a dangerous secret, the source of much of the show’s tension: Salamina’s daughter Noliseng is living on the property, in violation of segregationist law.
When Elizabeth’s memory brushes up against something she was too scared to look at dead-on, Ott stages the action in shadow, behind a screen. The figures are distorted, sometimes huge, sometimes tiny, sometimes with no clear thematic logic. Why, on occasion, does her kindly father loom so menacingly?
Shanseia Davis’ remarkable work as Salamina is the key problem with Ott’s full-cast treatment. Davis is a marvel, mastering a clipped but singsong dialect and — in scenes that range from horseplay to anguish — always laying bare Salamina’s heart. By contrast, Elizabeth’s thin, first-person perspective holds her like an envelope holds a smoldering coal.
Toward the end, after history has gutted Elizabeth’s childhood and revolutionary violence has claimed a key character, the focus remains personal to the point of vanity. Can Elizabeth ever love Africa again? the show asks, a question that it spends much more time considering than it does, say, What happened to Salamina?
Rep standby Gary Neal Johnson brings warm grace to the role of Elizabeth’s doctor father, and it’s fun to watch an actor of his renown in a series of minor ensemble roles. Playing a bloated, racist preacher, he serves as a comic warning of the dangers of fundamentalism; he also concocts a silly walk for the ages.
Ott’s choices are sometimes effective and sometimes confounding. Time leaps forward without notice, and scenes stop and start without transitions. The audience must occasionally spend too much energy just catching up. Just moments after the birth of Salamina’s baby, Noliseng (a scene of nicely realized shadow play), actress Tocarra Cash, who had until this point been playing a servant, plays the kid at maybe 3 years of age. Neither the leap in time nor the character shift is made explicit, so when a fracas ensues over damage that Noliseng has done to Elizabeth’s “most special” doll, I didn’t understand that this was Noliseng. Instead, as Cash baby-talked and hobbled along on her knees, I assumed, for a moment, that the servant she’d been playing was — as my grandma might say — “a little touched.” Memory is fluid and inconstant, but it never has a hard time distinguishing between grown-ups and babies.
Unlike Love, Janis or Sherlock Holmes, the Rep’s recent, lightweight offerings, this show demands close attention. And it may distinguish between grown-ups and babies, but not between what matters to one woman and what matters to the world.
