STAGE REVIEW : ‘Bopha!’ Returns to Town

Anyone who missed the exuberant Earth Players of South Africa during their brief passage at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as part of the 1987 Los Angeles Festival now has a chance to catch up with them.

They are back with their production of “Bopha!”--a term that conveniently means arrest or resist , depending on how the speaker chooses to use it. If anything, this mildly intellectual exercise on the ethics of conduct among black South African policemen seems sharpened since last year--cleaner and smarter (or is it merely the effect of seeing the show for a second time and noticing how exquisitely this three-man ensemble purrs along like a Rolls Royce engine?). This engine not only hums, but sings, harmonizes and exults a capella.

“Bopha!” is (still) the latest incarnation of what has become known as “Township Theatre,” the unique offspring of an extraordinary marriage between anti-apartheid revolution and the unquenchable life-force of black South Africa, exemplified by such marvels as the sizzling “Asinamali!” and the touching “Woza Albert!” (both imported earlier to Los Angeles by the Mark Taper Forum).

It is idiosyncratically a fierce, simple, joyous and passionate theater, more army drill with song than choreographed movement, that feels like nothing so much as a modification of tribal ritual. In all cases, the company functions as a single organism dedicated to a single purpose: Demonstrating the daily contradictions and vexations of black life in South Africa and the black people’s unvanquishable ability to overcome it.

In this regard, “Bopha!,” the creation of black South African actor Percy Mtwa, is no less a celebration of the human spirit than were “Woza Albert!” (developed by Mtwa with Mbongeni Ngema) or “Asinamali!” (independently devised by Ngema). It reverberates with good humor and bursts with self-affirmation. In every case--and we’ve said this before--the exclamation points at the end of those titles are earned.

More than its predecessors, however, “Bopha!” poses a problem of conscience: The moral dilemma of being a black policeman in a white police state where you never arrest a white man (let alone shoot one) but are sanctioned to kill your own kind. In a fast succession of “scenes” we witness snippets from the lives of three men: police sergeant Njandini (Aubrey Radebe), his drifting brother Naledi (Aubrey Moalosi Molefi) and his radical son Zwelakhe (Sidney Khumalo).

For 80 lively minutes we witness confrontations between the self-important Njandini, his right-headed but unhappy son and his jobless brother, reluctantly coerced into joining the police force when his choice falls between jail and deportation or training camp and a job. Naledi doesn’t last long in the force: he asks the wrong questions and arrests the wrong people. But it all makes for a lot of rousing humor among the pain--a singular jocularity that seems to be the denominator of Township Theater: Effervescence in adversity.

In the end, some tough decisions are required of the bombastic Njandini and in a somewhat simplistic if not unclouded finale, he makes them. It is a sweet-sad ending, in which the family is morally reunited.

Mtwa directed his own script and his three actors are giving the same judicious performances we admired before. Radebe is never a very naughty if very misguided policeman; Khumalo is a son who wants to be dutiful, but is trapped between honoring his father or honoring his convictions, and Molefi is the unwitting black sheep who repeatedly gets knocked down for standing up for the right causes. What we admire most though, is the tapestry these three weave together. Call it, as we called it before, the fabric of uprising.

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., until Nov. 6. Tickets: $22-$25; (213) 627-6500.