\n<\/p>\n
The saloon is there. So are the dusty cowboy hats, the freshly laid railroad tracks and the Native American headdresses.<\/p>\n
But while \u201cDark Noon\u201d basks in these hallmarks of Hollywood westerns, it examines them through new eyes, leaving no triumphalist clich\u00e9 unquestioned. Virtually every scene in this collaboration between a Danish director and a South African theater company (at St. Ann\u2019s Warehouse<\/a> in Brooklyn in previews before opening June 17) ends with at least one bullet-riddled corpse on the parched red earth of the set. Many of the dead are female or Indigenous.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a western town,\u201d Nhlanhla Mahlangu, the co-director and choreographer, said of the archetypal tumbleweedy community that rises up over the course of the action, \u201cbut it is all the settlement towns of South Africa as well. We are also talking about the shootings in our country.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly all of the play\u2019s seven actors piled into an increasingly crammed green room with Mahlangu to discuss the work after their final performance at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., and they agreed about these similarities. \u201cSo much of our own lives are connected to these tropes,\u201d said Mandla Gaduka, a cast member.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The narrative in which the white-hatted cowboy tames the Wild West, typically through the explicit or (usually) implicit genocide of his Indigenous predecessors, comes in for withering scrutiny in \u201cDark Noon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tue Biering, who wrote the script and also directs, said he initiated the project about five years ago with a very different concept in mind. \u201cIt started with me wanting to talk about Africa through the lens of an American western film,\u201d he said in a Zoom interview. \u201cAnd it struck me that this was so wrong as a white European telling the story. I thought, \u2018How about if we reversed it? How about if you<\/em> told my<\/em> story?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Not specifically Biering\u2019s story, of course, but those of millions of Europeans who fled oppression and poverty from \u201ca time where white lives didn\u2019t matter,\u201d as the script cheekily puts it, only to find that any chance of owning land meant colonization. The savage irony of these men and women \u2014 but mostly men \u2014 going on to oppress the Indigenous populations that they discovered there plays a central role in \u201cDark Noon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Through a series of workshops in Johannesburg, Biering and Mahlangu assembled a company of actors and assigned each performer a research topic on American history (religion, gun culture, etc.). Later, the actors took turns trying on different outfits from a collection of western costumes in the center of the rehearsal room and improvising. The costumes, the research, the actors\u2019 memories of Clint Eastwood movies on VHS tapes and their own experiences in post-apartheid South Africa all went into Biering\u2019s script.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The mostly Black cast of \u201cDark Noon\u201d \u2014 one actor is white \u2014 ultimately wore something else as they portrayed the European settlers: whiteface. Lillian Tshabalala-Malulyck, who has been involved with \u201cDark Noon\u201d for five years, said her feelings about wearing the white powder have shifted over time.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the beginning, I was so excited about whitefacing,\u201d she said. \u201cAs a Black actor, it felt like a rebellious and freeing response to blackface. As the show has progressed, I do think about how two wrongs don\u2019t make a right. But I have learned to become OK in sitting with the awkwardness, and I think this show gives the audience a chance to do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n But several audience members sit for only part of the show. The cast members routinely pull them onto the set, where they sip whiskey, attend church and even square dance. Just as quickly, they find themselves herded into a barbed-wire pen and even sold in a slave auction, sometimes mere seconds after one of the more idyllic interactions.<\/p>\n Mahlangu compared the audience\u2019s experience to that of Sarah Baartman<\/a>, the South African woman who voluntarily sailed to England in the early 1800s and later found herself paraded around Europe as a freak-show oddity known as the Hottentot Venus. \u201cThere are times where you board this ship with no conception of what awaits you,\u201d Mahlangu said of the \u201cDark Noon\u201d stage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Also, he said, \u201cbecause our play is like a western movie, all Hollywood films have lead actors and extras. We have deluxe extras who have paid to be there!\u201d<\/p>\n One task that the audience members are spared is the real-time construction of a western town, as the cast members gradually fill the bare stage with a saloon, a church, a jail and other buildings.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I was reading about American history,\u201d Biering said, \u201cit was all about territory and planting something to say, \u2018This is my land.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Tshabalala-Malulyck compared the construction of the town to the ills of gentrification. \u201cIt speaks to development and progress,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it also asks: Who is this for? Who does it benefit?\u201d<\/p>\n