ESSA’S THEATER BATTLES APARTHEID

While hundreds around her make war, Saira Essa is making theater.

Essa, 29, founder and director of the Upstairs Theatre in Durban, South Africa, was in town recently as part of a State Department educational exchange, to meet and be met--and make known her artistic credo:

“With the South African situation as it is now,” she said in a cultured, articulate voice, “people like myself have decided we’re going to use theater as a means to fight for freedom. Theater that doesn’t say something about the country, or create a new awareness, will be meaningless.”

To that end, Essa points proudly to the subjects she’s tackled in her theater’s four-year existence, including two in-the-works projects on activists Nelson and Winnie Mandela, “Mahatma Gandhi” and “Steven Biko: The Inquest” (on the trial that followed Biko’s 1977 jail death), which she debuted at the 1985 Prithvi Festival in Bombay and restaged earlier this year at the Upstairs.

“ ‘Biko’ is the highlight of the work I’ve done,” she said, relaxing in a downtown hotel room. “It’s exactly the kind of stuff you don’t see there. You don’t talk about Biko, you’re not supposed to have his pictures. If you get caught with any of his writings, it’s treason.”

Essa, who’d hooked up with adapters John Blair and Norman Fenton on the play’s treatment (which also served as the basis for the Showtime production with Albert Finney), later broke with the pair and established her own version, “more stylized, but more South African as well. I added characters, dropped others, rewrote certain sections and introduced singers. . . . It is, for many people who’ve seen it, an event.”

For the director as well. Since the week she opened her theater, she’s been the target of ongoing harassment:bogus “violations,” slashed car tires, a wrecked sunroof and a torn stage curtain.

“That’s what the special branch does,” she said matter-of-factly. “Phone calls, knocks on the door in the middle of the night. They turn you into a mental wreck. What can be worse than knowing that somebody is watching you all the time?”

Occasionally, she knows, they do more than watch:”When I was involved in ‘Biko’ rehearsals, a lawyer who was representing some people in a treason trial came home one day and was just bumped off, shot in her garden.”

Essa allays her own fears by emotionally preparing for all situations.

“I think, ‘OK, I’m going to be practical. If (the police)come, I must remember to take my glasses;I must be able to see.’ Because I get very flustered when I can’t--and they know your weaknesses.” And the vulnerability of loved ones.

“My family has accepted that this is what I want to do,” she nodded, “but at one point, they were very concerned about their own safety--that my actions could affect everyone. And my husband (lawyer Charles Pillai) is wonderful, but it reached the stage where I got so neurotic about ‘Biko’ that we almost considered divorce.” Ironically, the rift was healed when Pillai agreed to appear in the play.

Her high-wire life style “is hard on him,” Essa acknowledged. “He’s a conservative, doesn’t like a wife who’s tripping all over without him, whose name keeps popping up in the papers.” Differing temperaments, backgrounds (“I come from a broken home, so I always had to find my own way;he led a more sheltered life”)and cultures (she’s “supposed to be Muslim,” he’s Hindu)helped delay the marriage:”I wouldn’t take his surname--and Indian women don’t do that. The typical Hindu woman wears a sari, a particular necklace that signifies she’s married, a dot on her forehead. That’s not the case with me.”

Clearly. Yet although Essa has become a fighter as an adult (“If I go somewhere and there are doors marked ‘white’ and ‘black,’ I go through the ‘white’--and dare someone to stop me”), she recalls as a child reacting unquestioningly to the prevailing race laws:”not being able to go to the circus on certain days, going to separate schools.” Only recently has the resentment begun to surface.

While she is an Indian by descent under “the government’s recognition of only white and black,” Essa is considered black, even though technically, since 1983, “coloureds” are also recognized. “I used to go around saying, ‘Color doesn’t matter, I don’t care about black and white.’ And when I first started the theater, everything was hunky-dory. But then so much started to happen. . . . When I acted in a play called ‘The Revenge’ (on mixed marriage)in 1980, I had white friends, a white boyfriend--and because of that, I could relate to this black woman talking about her experiences. And I went through a lot of those things while we were doing the play--we had to apply for a permit for a mixed cast, special toilet facilities.

“But when I tried to do the play again last year, I had to quit after the first week. I told the director, ‘I cannot be on stage with this white man and tell him that I love him, when in fact I don’t think I can love a white man. I don’t think that’s a pertinent issue. We’re concerned with problems in housing, education, detention without trial--that’s where I am now.’ I had moved, I’d grown. I still have white friends and I like them, but-- they’re white. And I can’t help hating the white man for all the wrongs he’s done.”

For Essa, those wrongs include “an inferior education, an ethnic university (at Durban-Westville), and then I couldn’t get a job on television or radio as an announcer or actress.” Concluding that the white world was closed to her, she made plans to open her own theater, “write and act in my own plays, and start my own drama school to support the theater.”

Since then, she’s been encouraged by the burgeoning activity around her: “It used to be in South Africa that black theater was very pessimistic, all ‘woe is me’ kind of stuff. Now it’s vibrant, like ‘Asinamali!’ (Mbongeni Ngema’s soaring protest play, presented in August at the Mark Taper): ‘There’s a revolution here, and it’s knocking at the door. You better move fast, get your act together and go .’

“There are many black personalities who are talented, who are writing--and ours is not the only professional theater company presenting (that work). You’re seeing a new generation now, a new way of thinking, and it’s very exciting.

“Frightening, too,” she added. “The South African government is very strong;every time a fearless person comes up and starts organizing--making speeches, holding meetings--he’s shoved into prison. There’s a lull, then somebody else comes up. But it’s at the point now where something’s got to happen. (The white supremacists’)days are numbered--you can see it in their faces. When the bombs start falling on their precious white children in their lovely white classrooms, things are going to get rough.”

Harsh words?

“I think South Africa does that to you. If I wasn’t living there, perhaps I would be different. But you can’t live there and be subjected to those laws, that discrimination and be removed from it. (Her mother lost a kidney after being rejected by a “white” hospital.)I suppose there are apathetic people who don’t care:who send their children to Indian schools, go to Indian cinemas and Indian beaches. But for me, living that way would be like trying to be normal in an abnormal society. I won’t do it.”