The Future Works at Color-Blind S....

We invite evidence of struggle and risk rather than comfortable commercial certainty. We have learnt to measure our accomplishments through a count of challenged minds rather than empty or full seats.

Market Theatre Annual Report

The evidence is irrefutable: There is struggle here, and there is risk. In this smoggy muddle of race, philosophy, nationalism and politics, the strugglers and risk takers find themselves fighting--with urgency, without franchise--for every inch of progress and every wheezing breath.

Amid the complexities and confusions, this city’s Market Theatre is an iron lung. Out with the bad air, in with the good. There’s no room for apartheid in its atmosphere.

Since its improbable conception in 1976, the Market Theatre has consistently offered a color-blind vision and physical grammar to both the language of protest and the language of the heart. It has shouted to all who would hear that the nation is its people, not its government, and that not all of its people are mired in racism. It has also been home to some of the most thrilling and respected theater in the world.

The Market has granted uncompromised haven to the internationally honored talents of its own--like Athol Fugard, Janet Suzman, John Kani and Winston Ntshona--while importing the best foreign plays to its stages. It has nourished the unshakable township spirits of, among many, Mbongene Ngema. Like an African alchemist, he has turned rage into gold through shows like “Woza Albert!,” “Asinamali!” and “Sarafina!” The Market has fostered the satirical mischief of Afrikaner Pieter-Dirk Uys, the nation’s one-man equivalent of an anti-apartheid “Saturday Night Live.” And it has taught a new generation of playwrights, actors, technicians, and craftsmen that, even in South Africa, opportunity and personal expression do not have to be functions of color.

But, ultimately, the Market’s three theaters, warehouse cabaret, two restaurants, a bar, a jazz club, an art and photo gallery, shopping arcade and weekend flea market have done something else, something much simpler, yet much grander, than any of the wonder that emerges from its stages. The Market, open to all races, has let a beleaguered country break free to catch a glimpse of a non-racial future and then let the country see that it can work. The South Africa of apartheid and paranoia, fear and injustice, restrictions and repression, stops abruptly at the Market’s doors.

“If you were to say where is the future of South Africa happening, the first place I’d point to is the Market,” suggests playwright Fugard, whose “My Children! My Africa!” will receive its West Coast debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in July.

“It is the most significant clearing house of ideas in the country--and real ideas, real thought, real examination, real agonizing. Plays--black, white, brown, Afrikaans, English--are all given real voice there. South Africa is working there.”

The concept seems heroic to everyone but the theater’s two founders and driving forces: managing director Mannie Manim and artistic director Barney Simon. Together, they present a confluence of opposites, a South African odd couple--Manim rangy, bearish, and aggressive; Simon compact, soft-spoken, and avuncular. They’ve been, and remain, pulled together by a singular vision: that South Africa belongs to its people. All of its people. It’s a vision they’ve never lost sight of.

“The whole premise of the way we’ve run this place from the beginning,” says Manim over dinner in one of the Market’s restaurants, “is that we’ve done what is the most natural thing for a human being to do. We haven’t made it exclusively anything. It’s everybody’s.”

“It’s really a simple sanity,” Simon augments in his Spartan office across the square. “Anywhere else in the world, it’s a simple sanity to do theater that anybody can come and see. I’ve never seen it (the Market) as anything extraordinary.”

Yet, given the context of both time and place, it is. And the rest of the theater world recognizes that. Gordon Davidson, artistic director of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, calls the Market “a theater with a soul.” Director Peter Brook cites its “integrity” and the power of “its stand.”

Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival likens it to “a beacon of hope beamed at a South African future of peace, justice and racial harmony.”

But that utopian dream of the future is still just that, in the future. Despite new President F.W. de Klerk’s promises of more freedom, of reform, restructuring and the redefinition of society with all races eventually sharing in the power base, the current South Africa is still one of the world’s dark spots, a country at its precarious crossroads, the uphill fork pointed towards liberty and franchise, the other plunging towards racial conflagration.

“This is a country where the confrontation is so clear,” says Simon softly. “All de Klerk is doing right now is obscuring that confrontation with his promises. But are they from the heart or because economic sanctions are pressing him? Like ‘The Dybbuk,’ which seeks to evoke the name of God and Satan as one creature, South African theater and the great South African plays must do the same as they give voice to the confrontation. The Market must keep reflecting that.”

“Other theaters,” says Kani, an assistant director of the Market since 1986, “exist here solely to entertain the white audience and keep South Africa on a par with what’s going on in the West End or Broadway. The Market concerns itself with theater of this country, for this country. The work we do becomes like a newspaper of what is happening here. It becomes the conscience of our people.”

A conscience constantly tested, and constantly firm. “Over the most difficult period in South Africa,” Fugard stresses, the Market “has given me the opportunity to do my plays without compromise.”

A dozen times the official censors have tried to clamp a lid on individual Market shows, and a dozen times the Market has fought back and won. It’s survived bomb scares, walkouts and rivers of red ink, refusing to apply for the government permits required to legalize its open-door policy, while consistently shunning direct or indirect government subsidy. (If the two seem at odds, remember, this is South Africa.) An urgency of purpose keeps it emotionally thriving. That same urgency keeps pressing it to evolve, to react to and mirror the times, and never forget the dream of equality on the horizon.

“We continue,” says Kani, “to survive through our own resilience, daring and stupid bravery at times, not with the compliments of the powers that be. Because of our resilience, we have become a little voice”--”a tiny little revolution,” in Manim’s view--”that’s hard to silence by our wonderful new reformed government.”

Hearing that voice, then providing it a forum was precisely what Manim and Simon envisioned from the start. Pre-Market, the only way to avoid that moral compromise was to bring your thoughts and theater underground.

By the time Simon and Manim hooked up to form the Company, the theater’s resident producing body, Simon was already a veteran of the milieu. He had staged his first plays, often vehicles to teach the untaught about public health and other personal issues, in living rooms and open spaces that he poetically dubbed Theater of the Fields.

To support his efforts, he passed a hat for donations rather than overtly selling tickets--that way he would escape government restrictions on a technicality. He would take his work into the townships (something the Market continues to do) and put them on beneath the windows of those under house arrest. He would send his actors into the streets, the courts, the train station and bus stops, in search of the feelings and characters that he could mold with them into new plays resonating with the South African experience. “Theater has its own muscularity,” he says, “and its own rules without walls.” Plays like “Woza Albert!”--the Market’s first production to play the Taper--were born through this process.

Manim, meanwhile, felt stuck within the walls he had built for himself. He had risen through the ranks of the conventional system of British and American imports at the National Theatre in Pretoria, to the directorship of the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal, the country’s northernmost province. But it wasn’t enough. “It was the frustrations of running that company that served as the catalyst to give me the energy of a bloody spring to release myself. And that brought Barney and me together.”

They formed the Company in 1973, working partially in a segregated theater under the condition that a special Sunday performance would be open to all races, and partially in any storefront, restaurant and garage they could find. Says Manim: “We found that there was this hunger for the work we were doing.” In 1975, they found their home.

Johannesburg had outgrown its turn-of-the-century market--a massive steel structure shipped from Great Britain and constructed in 1916--in Newtown, on the edge of what’s now downtown. Scheduled for demolition, it got a reprieve when the city council decided it might make an interesting theater complex. Based largely on Manim’s state-theater experience, the Company was awarded the lease. “We looked,” he says, laughing, “to be the safest bet.”

Until they got their act together. Quietly, the word seeped through the community that the theater would be open to all, and just as quietly at first, the Market refused to apply for the non-racial permit allowing it to do so. “A permit applied for is a permit that can be rescinded,” says Manim. More important, “we decided we’d rather not get involved with the system. In the end, we make a bigger statement.”

Chekhov’s “The Seagull” opened the 152-seat upstairs theater in June, 1976, followed by Fugard’s “The Blood Knot.” In October, the 465-seat main theater under the old vegetable market’s dome debuted with “Marat/Sade”--half the audience walked out in shock that first night, including the council member who approved the lease. Afrikaans and African productions quickly followed. “We immediately pinned our colors to the mast,” says Manim.

The trick, of course, has been to keep those colors flying. After some early government hassles, the theater’s been left relatively alone. “There’s a rather bitter irony here,” Fugard suggests. “I think it reflects the degree of contempt the authorities have for live theater. They just don’t think that live theater adds up to anything, that closing the Market down would have been more of an embarrassment, like killing a fly with a sledgehammer.”

Manim takes that one perverse step further. “Our international success”--productions at the Taper, Lincoln Center, the New York Shakespeare Festival, London’s West End; a host of international awards, including Obies, Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, and a pair of Edinburgh Festival Fringe Firsts--”has a lot to do with the fact that we have this relatively privileged position of doing what we’re doing and not getting totally slammed. The fact that we have achieved a great deal of success abroad as unashamedly being from here, in a crazy way causes pride in the people that rule this country. They have pride in ‘Serafina!,’ ‘Asinamali!’ and ‘Woza Albert!,’ all these plays that are telling a not very nice truth about this place in a dramatic form in the cultural spotlight.”

There is another important offshoot to the Market’s successes beyond its own borders. “We’re going into a new phase where performers are very proud of the work they’re doing and the way they are being received in cities like London, New York and Los Angeles,” says Manim. “After a tour, they want to come back and do more. We’re beyond the phase of self-exile, where many felt there wasn’t any long-term outlet for what they wanted to do here. Now, thanks in a small way to what we do here, there is an urge to come back and regenerate and rekindle.”

Still, international acclaim doesn’t keep the doors open back home. The Market accepts no government subsidies, since “‘we feel most money is dirty,” says Manim. “And there’s no way that once you get into that pool here you’re going to come out alive.”

As a result, the Market is constantly strapped for funds, supporting itself primarily through ticket sales to support the Company and corporate and private donations to the nonprofit Market Theatre Foundation. The foundation manages the building (rented from the city at about $1.50 a year) and promotes such activities as fostering new playwrights, education in theater arts, bringing plays to the townships, and providing transportation for groups to come to the Market from the townships. According to its annual report, the foundation last year had an operating income of about $700,000 and expenditures of $800,000. An American branch of the foundation last year raised more than $120,000.

Despite the Market’s commercial uncertainties, as South Africa changes, the constant challenge facing the theater company is how to stay true to its self-styled mandate as a theater for all the people.

“I admit that we are guilty at times of preaching to the converted,” says Manim. “But it’s necessary to have that nourishment, to know that they’re of a group, to know they’re in a community of like-minded people.” On the other side, “There’s the crowd that gets nervous when we get too many fists up there on stage.”

“They are exhausted by political theater,” Simon adds. “They don’t want to be shocked and they don’t want to be depressed. Some of our actors have acted to three or four people in an audience, but they were doing something they believed in.”

“So,” says Manim, “we have to do ‘Driving Miss Daisy.’ Then that crowd relaxes and starts to come towards us again. And then something funny happens. Because the standard has been good and because, thank heavens, we keep doing successful local theater, even when it’s at its hardest-hitting, it pulls in an audience.”

The key is the mix. When “My Children! My Africa!,” perhaps Fugard’s fiercest--and most personal--statement on South Africa’s troubles and the wedge those troubles drive into the heart, closed in the main theater, a production of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” moved in. At the same time, “A Walk in the Woods” was playing the upstairs theater, while both the Laager and the Warehouse resonated with the sounds of township and protest pieces.

The method to the Market’s programming madness is not just confined to what’s happening on stage. Several years ago, when the South Africans and Mozambicans were skirmishing on their shared border, Simon mounted a production of Euripides’ anti-war drama “The Trojan Women” in Afrikaans with Afrikaner TV stars, a natural magnet for the more stolidly conservative Afrikaner audience. At the same time, another stage was filled with the black musical “The Me Nobody Knows.” “There were no clashes in the foyer, but there was complaint,” Simon says.

More importantly, there was elbow-rubbing. “Some of the most exciting times we’ve had in this theater we’ve had when we’ve had a very political play in one spot, and an Afrikaans play treating a very ordinary Afrikaans subject in another,” says Manim. “Then this Afrikaner audience and the black audience mingles in the foyer, and that starts to do something. There’s a bit of a fusion that goes on that’s very very good.”

“For a whole constituency of people,” says Manim, “not all of them loving and warm and willing from the start, and not all of them still loving and warm and willing, this place has become some sort of fulcrum, a real window for us all to see our country.”

And, even as winds of change blow through that window, there is still much to see, much to be done, and much to commit to.

“Resistance,” says playwright/performer Ngema, now leader of his own troupe, Committed Artists, “started so many years ago, and we’re still going through it. How can a theater of resistance, which echoes our life struggle, run out? The importance of our theater can never run out.

“When we’re free, we’ll be a young country all over again. In a free society, it is incumbent upon us to provide an education for the people through theater. Because we have not been educated to stand up and believe in ourselves--we have been educated to be subservient and believe in the master--we have to re-educate ourselves.”

“I look forward to the day when we are free and I can do ‘No, No, Nanette,’ ” says Kani. “But not now. I must concentrate all my efforts in the attainment of freedom for my people.”

“What greater grace is there on earth,” asks Simon, “than to be committed, to have no choice outside of a commitment? It’s not just a question of being opposed to injustice in the country. It’s also a love of the country. This is my country, too. And that,” he adds softly, “is not a question of being heroic.”