Friday, January 21, 2011
Three disparate productions highlight haunting aspects of Africa
Chicago Sun-Times: "South Africa was the subject of much powerhouse theater throughout the apartheid era, and Wole Soyinka wrote about Nigeria decades ago. But until recently, plays about other parts of Africa have been few and far between, despite the fact that the continent has been the focus of countless headlines, with datelines ranging from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone to, most recently, Sudan and the Ivory Coast.
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2 comments:
“In Ghana, I began to realize how everything is about the community, while American culture is so individualistic," a quote from an intern at the Goodman who is assisting in the artistic direction. I think what she is speaking to and perhaps why we haven't seen a lot of African theater in this country (though a good percentage of our population is African-American) is the difference between African countries and American countries, two Western (non-Eastern)cultures separated by individual cultures. The article mentions Woyle Soyinka, an African playwright, reading Soyinka's tragedies are very different than our easily-digested Greek/European tragedies.
What I'm getting at is, I think the lack of African shows in America is not an issue of race but an issue of culture.
It's great that people are bringing the issues in Africa to life on such a grand scale. I feel that there are so many different problems in Africa, that people tend to focus on the most horrific or most "newsworthy" tragedy. True, the most tragic events are the ones which should be addressed first, but there's more to be brought to light than just the biggest event. This is a great step towards taking global issues as a whole more seriously, as opposed to taking the most appalling issue seriously without much else in mind.
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