ACTING MARATHON---28 ROLES NIGHTLY   
                                              By Georgia Rowe
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area theater, music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Feb. 4-11, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 61
          WALNUT CREEK, CA---Solo plays are always risky – if the performer in question fails to connect with the script or the audience, the result can be a very long night indeed.  The strength of  “The Syringa Tree,” which opened Feb. 2 in a captivating Center Repertory Company production, is that Shannon Koob, playing 28 roles in Pamela Gien’s Obie Award-winning drama, breathes life into all of them.  If her performance, which morphs through characters young, old, black, white, English, Afrikaans and others, never quite makes you forget that’s she’s the only actor onstage, she manages to create a distinct identity for each.  That’s accomplishment enough in this moving coming-of-age story set in South Africa.
            The play’s principal character and engaging narrator is Elizabeth.  Six years old when the story begins, she’s the picture of white privilege.  Her overworked physician dad and harried, often depressed housewife mother have insulated Elizabeth and her brother, John, from the injustices of apartheid.  Cared for by her beloved nanny, Salamina, Elizabeth spends her days playing under the estate’s enormous syringa tree – a symbol of security and shelter, as well as history – with Salamina’s daughter, Moliseng, comfortable in the belief that their mutual affection makes them equals.
            If the story is about the end of that dream, it’s also about the changes in South Africa itself.  By the end of the 105-minute production, the Soweto riots have happened, apartheid has ended, and racial violence has claimed the lives of a number of Elizabeth’s family and friends.  Now a young woman, Elizabeth has moved to California, married and had a child of her own.  A return visit supplies a somber coda, as she faces the extent of her losses, and begins to comprehend what still remains.
            Gien’s script is a marvel of narrative and nuance.  The playwright grew up in South Africa – two of the characters are named for her grandparents – and her writing is filled with sensory memories: the smell of thunderstorms, the taste of candy “sweets” eaten on the back porch, the smoothness of mud floors on bare feet.  Director Michael Evan Haney gives the play an evocative staging on Narelle Sissons’ rusty metal-and-rock set; James Sale’s lighting, Elizabeth Eisloffel’s costumes and Chuck Hatcher’s sound designs provide apt enhancement. 
            Gien also has a keen ear for the voices of her South African characters – children, servants, a prim schoolmistress, a disapproving preacher, an English-speaking black nurse who’s “more white than white.”  Koob’s mercurial performance captures them all in deft strokes.  But it’s her articulate, endlessly kinetic Elizabeth, telling much of the story from the vantage point of a rope swing suspended from the title tree, who proves an irresistible presence.  If “The Syringa Tree” is a love letter to Gien’s childhood, Elizabeth makes an ardent messenger.
             Pamela Gien's "The Syringa Tree” continues in a Center Repertory Company production, through Feb. 27 at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.  105 minutes, without intermission. For info:  925-943-7469, or go online.  
        ©Georgia Rowe 2010
                                       #
            Georgia Rowe is a Bay Area arts writer. Her work has appeared in Opera News, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Contra Costa Times in addition to artssf.com.     These critiques appearing several times weekly focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.           
              Return to main menu.