February 3- 9, 2005

theater

Up A Tree

by Toby Zinman

Pam Gien's memoir of her childhood in South Africa is played on a bare stage with a blue sky and a single prop: a wooden swing hanging from an unseen syringa tree. With words and gestures, the talented Catherine Slusar conjures up the tree, just as she conjures up 24 characters — old, young, black, white, male, female. She can chirp as the 8-year-old Lizzie or growl as her nanny, Salamina. She ranges through the distinctive and various accents of South African speech, and she can even "click" when she sings a song in Xhosa. Directed by Whit MacLaughlin, this one-woman show is an immense effort.

A little too immense, if you ask me. This intermissionless, many-voiced monologue, running nearly two hours, is relentless in its muchness — too many themes, too many characters, too many saintly people. Anyone threatening, including the vicious murderer of her kindly grandfather, is kept offstage. Every resentment, every political complication, every social complexity remains a simpleminded mystery, as it would be to a well-protected little girl.

Keeping all that at bay in a play about apartheid-era South Africa is no mean task, and because so much of the play is dominated by Lizzie's innocence, things get fairly cloying after a while. Gien depicts her young self as unfailingly adorable, generous and good-natured. Her father, a liberal Jewish physician, is always running off to save lives, and her mother, a liberal Catholic, is undaunted by the hostility and dangers around her. They are served by a large staff of African servants, almost all cheerful and devoted. When Lizzie says, "If you're a lucky fish, Zephyr will sing the forbidden prayer song," Zephyr, the neighbor's gardener, complies. Why is it forbidden? Why were Zephyr's fingers cut off? How does he feel about entertaining a little white girl with a "forbidden" song?

When Salamina's baby, who must be hidden since she has no "special paper" to allow her to live outside the townships, disappears, a plot seems to emerge. But the mysteries are never really solved, the characters are never sufficiently developed to understand their motivations, and all the emotional responses that the show requires of us lack specific source. Well, sure we feel a lump in our throat for a mother grieving over her vanished daughter, but who are these people and why do they do what they do?

Little Lizzie doesn't know, and neither do we.

THE SYRINGA TREE Through March 13, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122