‘The Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane’ at InterAct

Wouldn’t it be interesting for us to talk, said the woman: Her husband experienced the “disenfranchisement” of the end of the apartheid, while my husband benefited. She was surprised that I visit my in-laws and said that her husband had found it best to turn his back in favor of life in the U.S.

My throat closed up at the idea of apartheid’s end as an injustice to white people and the implication that modern South Africa isn’t a place worth visiting.

Strange dichotomies

Discuss South Africa with most Americans and you’ll find a range of strange dichotomies: The knowledge that it’s one of the most powerful and advanced economies on the continent still clashes with many people’s inability to see the country as anything other than one giant Kruger Park, full of lions right out the window of your thatched-roof hut.

Eat at Sakhumzi on Vilakazi Street (right down the road from a museum that was once Nelson Mandela’s home), a restaurant famous for drawing droves of locals and visitors alike, and watch busloads of tourists flooding the sidewalk in what will probably be their only foray into Soweto.

Soweto is a popular destination for travelers across the world — as long as they can see it from their bus. Guidebooks advise travelers not to venture there alone.

Everyone knows South Africa has “come so far” since the 1980s, but with income gaps that can make low-income Americans look downright comfortable, is it really true? Shantytowns full of corrugated tin roofs and walls, with no electricity or plumbing, sprawl right next to wealthy gated communities.

A dangerous safe house

So I couldn’t miss the premiere of American-born playwright Jen Silverman’s Dangerous House of Pretty Mbane, directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh, at InterAct. Could an American writer, albeit one who’s lived and traveled in many countries, really catch the truths, troubles, and rhythms of contemporary South Africa?

Silverman sets her story during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, when a young female soccer — oops, football — star, Noxolo, returns home from a sports scholarship in London in order to find her missing lover, a “reckless” woman named Pretty Mbane (Lynnette R. Freeman), who operates a safe house for a special kind of victim.

Others call Pretty’s house a brothel, but it’s a refuge for victims of “corrective rape,” a horrific crime committed ostensibly with the goal of turning lesbian women straight by raping them.

According to a fact sheet in the InterAct playbill, advertising a special program on January 31 with South African activist Ndumie Funda, who inspired the play’s story, there are more troubling dichotomies. South Africa was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in Africa, but each year over 500 women report that they are victims of corrective rape. Knowing what we do about official reports of rape versus the actual incidence of the crime in America, I quake to think how high the numbers of South African victims could really be.

Funda, founder of the Cape Town-based LGBTQ-advocacy nonprofit Luleki Sizwe, launched a successful petition that led to the South African government recognizing corrective rape as a hate crime in 2013.

Vuvuzelas and Zuma

“‘The new South Africa.’ That is very good,” Noxolo’s brother Sicelo tells a British journalist, Gregory (Ross Beschler), exiled during the World Cup to scrounge up interviews for “a bit of a flat story” on the country’s progress.

Silverman deftly and compellingly unspools each character’s backstory, not flinching from the violence many of them have suffered. Pretty herself has been killed before the opening of the play, but she lingers in a kind of limbo as Noxolo tries to discover her fate. An invisible “yellow dog” courts Pretty as a conduit to the afterlife (does he hearken back to the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog in August Wilson’s Piano Lesson, battling injustice from beyond the grave?).

Dialect coach D’Arcy Dersham, Yousefzadeh, and the cast should be recognized for great work with some of the most challenging dialects out there, at least for Americans. (Gregory gamely practices a Zulu “x,” but doesn’t even attempt a proper “c.”)

Aimé Donna Kelly delivers a powerful performance as Noxolo, her grin radiating a wolfish yet fragile bravura. Daniel Perelstein’s sound design accurately captures that backdrop of the townships: the buzzing blare of vuvuzelas from TV football matches and the all-night patter of music from the shebeens.

“You’re watching South Africa on TV, and you think that is what you left behind,” a South African friend in London, himself the victim of a hate crime, warns Noxolo.

Whatever the TV screens of the 2010 World Cup showed, in 2015 South Africa still suffers widespread poverty, discrimination, and government corruption. Many young South Africans I’ve spoken to are disillusioned with today’s ANC, still in power under Jacob Zuma, whose sexual and financial scandals have disgusted the public. But it would be hard to argue that its racial and governmental problems rival America’s.

Real smiles. Real change?

And Silverman captures something I’ve heard at least one expat South African say about that country’s friendliness: In South Africa, when someone smiles at you in the street, “their whole body holds the smile, not just their face.”

Silverman weaves in a theme that will sober most writers. Noxolo declares that “what’s written on paper about your rights” means nothing with no one to defend you, and she later taunts Gregory after she agrees to share a shocking story.

Will his article matter in a wider world, she wonders? There’ll just be a storm of “more articles about the articles being written about your article.” The news never stays new. So will things ever change?