The Island is not escapist theater
It seems only fitting that a play about the cruelties of time would leave me longing to spend more with its characters. The Kansas City Actors Theatre lives up to its name in its season-ending production of The Island, an apartheid-era drama that unfolds in four blistering scenes.
The play, devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, opens with an extensive mimed sequence on the shores of Robben Island, where prisoners and cellmates John (Damron Russel Armstrong) and Winston (Teddy Trice) heave Sisyphean shovelfuls of sand. As soon as one pile is depleted, a wheelbarrow dumps a new load at their feet. Sound designer Jae Shanks underscores the task’s monotony with a rhythmic barrage of realistic sound effects. Director Walter Coppage stretches the scene to exhaustion, letting us feel the tax of each gesture on the men.
When a whistle blows, the men file back to their cell and shed the day like a skin. The two have bunked together for nearly three years, and their camaraderie (and competition) shine through in each interaction. John spends his evenings fashioning crude costumes for his pet project — a two-man adaptation of the Greek legend Antigone. Winston spends his evenings trying to avoid playing Antigone.
“I’ve got no time for bullshit,” he says. “Fuck legends.”
Of course, he does have time — a lifetime. John’s release date is swiftly approaching, but Winston is serving a life sentence. And that discrepancy threatens to splinter their brotherly bond.
Damron Russel Armstrong lends a powerful voice and an almost campy theatricality to John. Armstrong’s command of the character’s accent and the play’s numerous Afrikaans words is faultless, and he ribs Winston with fraternal ease.
Teddy Trice is especially affecting as the moody Winston, as quick to anger as he is to reconcile. A monologue laying into John for abandoning him lingers in my mind as one of the play’s most affecting moments. What starts as an imaginative yarn about John’s release turns punishing and then cruel. “You stink of freedom,” he snarls, confessing his own pain.
The simple set, well-designed by Shane Rowse and Charles Moore, features an angled cell for better sight lines and more dynamic blocking. Enormous tetrapods loom behind it, breakwaters magnified to monstrous size. The structures provide an ominous canvas for Rowse’s lights: flashes of lightning dance across their corners, setting them starkly against the inky sea.
Rowse’s lighting design features strongly in the play’s final scene, a performance of Antigone in the cell-turned-stage. Winston plows through Antigone’s speeches in a rope wig and tin-cup bra (designed by costumer Sarah Oliver), but sheds them in the play’s tense final moments. The conversation tilts, and the lights outside shift tones to a poisonous green.
Antigone’s battle with Creon inspires a rebellion of Winston’s own. What comes of it is uncertain, but the play’s abrupt conclusion reminds us that incarceration’s cruelest punishment is not simply the time spent behind bars, but the erasure of one’s sense of time. Losing track of time means losing touch with the arc of a life — its rising action, its stultifying intermissions, its climaxes and act breaks that bear down with age — and losing touch with humanity writ large.
Trice and the Kansas City Actors Theatre drive that loss home in a production as sensitive as it is subversive.
