Lantern's "The Island' (1st review)

The true purpose of theater, director Peter DeLaurier contends in the Lantern's program notes for The Island, is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

But whatever affliction or comfort we feel in the friendly confines of St. Stephen's Theater is surely nothing compared to the affliction or comfort that viewers experienced in South Africa in 1973, when The Island was first performed at the height of Apartheid as a collaborative work by Athol Fugard (who is white) and the black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona.

As a white American woman married to a black native of South Africa, I'm all too familiar with those emotions. My father-in-law was arrested more than once in Johannesburg in the '70s. Once he was jailed because he didn't have the correct stamp in the passbook all black citizens were required to carry.

"Hey! Hey! You!" he remembers the Afrikaner police shouting all the time. "Why are you walking there?' If it was hazardous then for a black man to walk quietly down the street in South Africa, the courage required to develop and mount a play about real-life inmates of South Africa's infamous Robben Island prison (home to Nelson Mandela for 18 of his 27 incarcerated years), as these now world-famous collaborators did, is hard to fathom.

Antigone in prison

The play is based on a curious convergence of theater and politics that occurred in 1965. That year the South African Serpent Players theater company (which included Fugard, Kani and Ntshona) performed Antigone in New Brighton. Another actor in that performance, Norman Ntshinga, was later arrested for anti-Apartheid activity. During his time on Robben Island, Ntshinga performed Antigone for his cellmates and later described the experience to The Island's playwrights. His stories form the basis of the play.

The Island features just two characters: Winston and John, whose political crimes have landed them in the cell together at Robben Island for almost three years. John (played by Frank X) is serving ten years, while Winston (U.R.) suffers a life sentence. In DeLaurier's extended living tableau of crushing labor, the play opens with Winston and John shoveling at the beach, endlessly excavating and then dumping their sand into each other's holes. U.R. and X mime their shovels and wheelbarrows with such grinding concentration that they're dripping with sweat long before their first lines.

At John's importunate urging, the pair is rehearsing for a prison "concert" at which they will present the trial of Antigone, John appearing as Creon and Winston appearing as Antigone. After a backbreaking day at the beach, John tries to draw the memorized plot of their coming performance out of Winston in an insistent rehearsal, leading to a clash over the truth of Antigone.

Cell doors and manacles

Winston, pragmatically simplifying the classic themes of Sophocles, balks at performing Antigone's guilty plea for burying her brother, an enemy of the state. "She had every right!" he shouts at John.

"Antigone pleads guilty!" John rages back.

"Fine, do it your way!" Winston concedes.

Many important physical pieces of the characters' world, like cell doors and heavy manacles, are mimed with the help of Daniel Perelstein's masterful sound design. But a handful of ragged props for the prisoners' performance are fully realized onstage, carefully hoarded under their pillows. This choice lends interesting weight to the play-with-the-play.

Frank X and the lyrical U.R. (who, between the two actors, best approaches the challenging South African dialect) make poignant partners, easily ranging from prickly dudgeon and heart-stopping empathy to humor.

Sweaty costumes

Janet Embree's lights sculpt the actors' faces and bodies with a splendid dignity. After Winston learns that John's sentence has been reduced for a release only three months away, while Winston is doomed to spend the rest of his life incarcerated, Embree helps U.R. to register a silent despair that's ghoulish in its cruelty.

DeLaurier's direction lingers with a sure hand over many of the play's most emotionally and physically demanding moments, building to a final scene of triumphant power.

Nick Embree's stonelike in-the-round platform of a set provides the perfect meeting of stage and cell, and Natalia de la Torre's costumes are as fittingly threadbare, sweaty and battered as the men themselves. Perelstein's sound is an arresting mix of beauty and oppression: the gentle rush of waves, sea-birds' cries and ethereal traces of song woven against the hateful shouts of the Robben Island guards— "Haart coop, kafir!"— and the rattling clang of prison life.

The ironic triumph of the Lantern production's final tableau comforts us 21st-Century Philadelphians with the assurance that Winston and John have not surrendered their humanity and that, though they don't know it, their future isn't so bleak.

A father's shrug

But it must be much easier now than it once was to end the show on a high note that presages the eventual toppling of the Apartheid regime. When Apartheid ended in the early 1990s, my husband was in middle school, but his parents had been raising six children for more than 20 years under fears of systematic racial violence, arrests and forced relocation.

Once I asked my in-laws whether, when their children were small, they ever thought things would change. My Tsonga father-in-law gave a simple, wide-eyed shrug. "No," he said.

Sometimes I still dwell on that moment, really trying to understand how he must have felt. Even today, with a living veteran of Apartheid sitting on the couch beside me, I don't think I can truly achieve it. A contemporary production of The Island in Philadelphia is unlikely to be able to do it either. But the Lantern's production comes as close as it can to making audience members feel what Robben Island inmates felt behind bars at that time, not knowing that anything better was to come.♦


To read another review by Marshall A. Ledger, click here.
To read a related comment by Jackie Atkins, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.