Los Angeles Festival : SOUTH AFRICAN POLICEMEN ARE HUMANIZED IN ‘BOPHA’

To be a black policeman patrolling the black townships of South Africa gripped in the iron-fisted rule of white apartheid--now there’s a desperate quandary.

Most take the job initially out of an urgent need for an income to support a family (no small chore in black South Africa) and out of a vaguely idealistic sense that a system of law and order is the only device that will keep the country from being sucked into the boiling maelstrom of total anarchy.

But what does it mean to a black man who thinks he is acting in the name of family and law to find himself an armed agent of apartheid, an outcast in the community which was once his but now wants his head aflame in a necklace (the burning tires in which suspected traitors are hung) and a feared stranger in his own home?

That’s the predicament examined in writer-director Percy Mtwa’s “Bopha,” the story of a proud black policeman, his divided brother and his radical son, which has its West Coast premiere Sunday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

You’ll recall Mtwa as one-half of of the vibrant and amazingly expressive duo that alone onstage managed to re-create a top-to-bottom South African social response (with trains and helicopters thrown in) to the second coming of Christ in “Woza, Albert!”

Mbogeni Ngema represented the other half. Ngema’s troupe, The Committed Players, brought us the high-energy bittersweet “Asinamali” at the Mark Taper Forum a year ago. At that point “Asinamali” gave off definite signals of an emerging, fiercely passionate genre of theater unlike any other in the world.

“Bopha,” created by Mtwa’s Earth Players, is a continuation of that style, which began with John Kane, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard’s “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island,” a theater heavily rooted in traditional Zulu movement, song and expression caught in the whiplash of modern South Africa’s seemingly bottomless agony. It’s a taut, sensual, explosive, almost panic-stricken theater that emanates from the South African black’s physical sense of political compression, the deep anxiety that this day could be your last.

The style, for want of a better term, might be called “Township Theater.” Explains Mtwa: “There is no theater in the townships. You have to perform in community halls, churches and pool halls, and you have to get permission from local superintendents at the last minute.” That means a minimum of props, scenery and costumes and a maximum of theatrical martial-arts techniques, where virtually all of the tools of expression emanate from the body.

As the latest expression of Township Theater, “Bopha” is paradoxically the most classical. It’s the first to deal with family and the first to deal with the wholly well-intended individual as an outcast.

“ ‘Bopha’ was first conceived in 1984, when I was touring in San Francisco with ‘Woza,’ ” Mtwa said. “It was then that people in the townships began taking black police--the anger was so great that apartheid was briefly put aside. I had an actor friend whose father was a policeman. I heard stories.”

The issue was more than passingly ironic for Mtwa--his own father had been a policeman.

“He was a kind man, popular, loving, warm. An entertainer. He worked the last part of his life as a tailor, but earlier he had been a policeman. Apartheid broke his spirit. He told me ‘Never, never become a policeman.’ He died from drink in 1982. He was one of those people who believed that politics should be left to the politicians. He never saw how politics shapes us all. Apartheid has trapped people in their own society. It’s a crime against humanity.”

Mtwa’s private sentiments may be militant but it’s his caution that has ironically given “Bopha” its universal breadth. “I had to be careful of how I dealt with this issue of black police coming to the point where they have to fire on their own people. I didn’t want to confront the government. I thought of bringing in the idea of family. Everybody has a family.” (Mtwa, 33, is married with two children and grew up in a family of 10.)

Like “Woza, Albert!,” “Bopha” was created out of stories Mtwa gathered from traveling through the townships. Aubrey Radebe, who plays the central character (Sydney Khumalo and Aubrey Moalosi Molefe are the other two performers) was once a policeman before going into the theater and had much to add about that way of life.

“I wrote ‘Bopha’ to try and ease the tensions,” Mtwa said. “I believe we theater people as artists deal with purifying the soul and shaping mankind in a certain way. We come and tell the truth today that people will discover tomorrow. It’s getting worse and worse in South Africa. There’s an atmosphere that shouldn’t be in the ‘80s. We envision a beautiful world and apartheid drags us back. Although drama deals in conflict, I didn’t want to create the sense of attacking an enemy. If we attack, the war never ends. I wanted instead to hold up the truth that we’re caught in this web.”

“Bopha,” which has toured England, Western Europe, New York and Washington, opened at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre in October of 1985--to an audience comprised of back and white policemen and children.

“People thought I was crazy to do that,” Mtwa said, “but I wanted it to be a release of tensions and it was. No one was angry. A lot of the black police take out their frustrations on the people because they don’t want to be policemen in the first place--it’s the only job they can get. But policemen are human. They live in this world. As for the children, they come into the world with new spirits and unpolluted consciences. They have questions without answers. They need something to fill their sense of emptiness created by apartheid. We’re giving life and hope where there’s seemingly none.”