Isabel Dyson, and Matt Simmons in My Children! My Africa! KVON Photo Courtesy of the MAC.
The year is 1985, and tensions are simmering in the fictionalized township of Brakwater, South Africa. Inside a classroom at Zolile High School, Mr. M and Thami Mbikwana are at a crossroads, their words straddling decades of understanding. Mr. M is older, more traditional: he believes that education, discussion and peaceful persuasion can create a path to liberation. Thami, a fresh-faced teenager with dashed dreams of becoming a doctor, wants to see change at any cost—even if it means violence.
Inside, it's a narrative sparring match, the sentences barbed and combustable. Outside, the sharp realities of apartheid shake the country. At some point, something has to give.
That conflict is front and center in Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa!, running at the Milford Arts Council (the MAC) through Feb. 15. Directed by Noelle Fair with an intimate and tight-knit cast, the work puts a sharp focus on race, racism, and social change in 1980s South Africa, telling a story from apartheid that remains painfully relevant today. Tickets and more information are available here.
"Disaster and tragedy happen, but also I think that it carries this uplifting message of, despite difficult times, there's hope," said director Noelle Fair on a recent episode of "Arts Respond," a collaboration between WNHH Community Radio and the Arts Paper. "... It's incredibly relevant. It's incredibly powerful. Audiences definitely come out of it feeling that they were struck with something."
"There's a really great line in the second act of the show, where my character Thami talks about how if change isn't being made for certain types of people, they will take matters into their own hands for that change to happen," added Matt Simmons, who has been acting with Eastbound for two years. "That is one of the recurring themes of this story ... overall, I am hoping that we can get as many people in the theater to see this story [as possible] ... I'm hoping it will just speak to a lot of people in different aspects."
Written in 1989, My Children! My Africa! tells the story of Mr. M (crafted from the real-life story of Anela Myalatya and played by Herman Livingston), a longtime educator in apartheid-era South Africa who is trying to teach his students that learning and discourse are the way forward.
His protégé, Thami (Matt Simmons), disagrees: he is disturbed by the unequal and often inhumane treatment of Black South Africans like himself and his mentor, and starts to get political when he doesn't see change happening any other way. In the midst of all of it, the audience also meets Isabel (Sabrina Lingenfelter), a well-meaning white girl who wants to see change, but is also a beneficiary of segregation in ways she doesn't even understand.
Fair, a Maryland transplant who is a teacher by day, has long dreamed of directing the show. Twenty years ago, she saw a performance as a requirement for a design class. When the final curtain had closed, she sat frozen in her seat for five minutes before getting up and returning to life as she knew it. She didn't expect that she would be working on it 20 years later—or that it would be just as relevant.
"It made me very curious about the Apartheid, because I don't think we're taught much about it in U.S. schools, and I kind of always had this show in the back of my brain," she said. "I didn't think that Eastbound Theatre would pick it ... and they did! So I'm excited to direct it. When they picked this, I said, 'Okay, here we go.'"
The result has been an educational journey for the cast and creative team, which includes several teachers. When Eastbound took the show—long before the U.S. election and a polarization of the country that she sees everywhere—Fair collected and shared materials with the cast that also has used for her Black and Latino History Studies classes, including on Trevor Noah's book Born A Crime. She and the cast learned and rehearsed words in Zulu and Xhosa, which are woven into the show. They built a timeline of South African history and invited in fellow educators, including Lily Saint, an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University. They dove in to the script, making space for discussions about the cyclical nature of history.
Now, they're excited to bring it to the stage. Listen to an interview with Fair and Matt Simmons below.