South African
paradise lost

>> Apartheid hits home in the Centaur’s
excellent version of The Syringa Tree

SWING LOW: Caroline Cave

by AMY BARRATT

As the Centaur’s new artistic director, Roy Surette points out in his program notes for The Syringa Tree that it’s been a while since we’ve seen South Africa portrayed on that theatre’s stage. If memory serves, we have to go back to 1990, when former AD Maurice Podbrey directed Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

Podbrey, who has been living in his native South Africa since handing the reins to Gordon McCall a decade ago, was in the opening night audience last week watching unfold a story that bears a passing resemblance to the Fugard play. Both address the tragedy of the apartheid years through friendships formed by young people across the racial divide—friendships doomed by outside forces. Like the best of Fugard’s works, Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree doesn’t preach, but merely shows us the damage a repressive system does to everyone living under it.

The Syringa Tree was originally performed by Gien, an actress who grew up in a suburb of Johannesburg in the ’60s and ’70s, and now lives in the U.S. The production that’s running at the Centaur stars Alberta native Caroline Cave in a performance that has already won her a Dora award (Toronto) and a Jessie award (Vancouver) for best actress. We are privileged to have it stop in our city.

Having won awards and filled houses elsewhere is not always a guarantee that a show is any good (see Defending the Caveman), but in the case of The Syringa Tree, all the accolades are deserved. Director Larry Moss has lovingly overseen the production since its conception in an acting class in 1994.

Narrated by six-year-old Elizabeth but inhabited by over 20 other characters, The Syringa Tree is a tale of paradise lost told with exquisite simplicity. An oversized child’s swing hangs slightly to one side of the stage. The actress uses no props or costume beyond a shapeless pink shift. Changes in time and location are indicated by lighting. This is a work that shows us what theatre can be, and reminds us why we loved it in the first place.

Part of what makes The Syringa Tree stand out from some other plays we see on our stages is that it was given the time to grow to its full potential. The final script is obviously the result of much blood, sweat and tears. Both Gien and now Cave have had the support they needed to carry off this incredible acting challenge.

A similar spirit inspires the work of Imago Theatre, and it paid off in their “workshop” production last week of Isadora: Fabulist! The play, which attempts to resurrect the “mother of modern dance,” has been in the works for three years, and watching it at the Monument National, you felt that.

Greg Kramer’s script could use a bit more justification at the top: Why have these spirits gathered in Père Lachaise cemetery to reenact the life of Isadora Duncan? But it is a compelling story, cleverly told, and you do get caught up in it. Affected though she is, Leni Parker’s Isadora is never silly, thanks to this performer’s remarkable grounded-ness. Everything, as Isadora herself would say, springs from the solar plexus. This show, with this phenomenal cast, deserves a longer run.

The Syringa Tree, to Dec. 2 at Centaur
(453 st-franÇois xavier), (514) 288-3161