Elise on her most positive theater experience

Last week we went on our excursion to Johannesburg. We managed to pack in a lot of things over just a few days, and writing about all of it would take a very long time. Instead I want to share one of the most memorable events which, for me, was the play Curl Up and Dye. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly what you’d call a theater buff. I can even remember right before it started praying that it wouldn’t be a musical (which it wasn’t) but this production may very well have been the most positive theater experience I’ve ever had. The play is set during the twilight of apartheid in a hair salon. It starts out with very superficial interactions between a multi-racial staff, subversively underlining the hierarchies between the different characters.  The play is clearly set in a rundown neighborhood that, despite being formerly classified white, is suffering in the time of transition. Admittedly I was really confused about the plot at first, but toward the end tensions between the characters explode into an obvious conflict of identity and power.

Following the play, we got to do a Q&A with the actors, playwright and director. This might have been even better than performance itself. They got to explain their own experiences with the production and their personal relationship to the themes explored. The cast consisted of an older white man and three young girls classified white, colored, and black. The director/writer was an older white woman. Each of these people had distinct backgrounds and personalities, and their views on the state of South Africa historically and today was very insightful. The director expressed especially the shift in the audience’s reception of the play from when it began in the 1980s to now. She said that before they got a lot of laughs but now the crowd often seems uncomfortable with the jokes, as though it’s all too real still. As much as museums can be wonderful sources of historical knowledge, the play felt much more human and authentic. I loved experiencing South Africa’s social issues in this context and was very personally touched by the human aspect of the performance.