By Pamela Gien Synopsis About NSU Theatreâ€™s Production

Notes on the NSU Theatre presentation of

By Pamela Gien

Synopsis

The Syringa Tree is a personal, deeply evocative story of an abiding love between two families, one black, one white, and the two children that are born into their shared household in early 1960’s South Africa. Seen first through the eyes of a child, six-year old Elizabeth Grace, as she tries with humor and palpable fear to make sense of the chaos, magic and darkness of Africa, the story of these families’ destinies spans four generations, from early apartheid to present day free South Africa. The four actresses will play twenty-four characters in the telling of this story.

About NSU Theatre’s Production The cast for NSU’s production will feature an ensemble of four actresses: Sara Pillatzki, Erin Guetter, Angela Nyugen and Richiè Ellingson. NSU Director of Theatre, Daniel Yurgaitis, directs the play, while NSU Technical Director Larry Wild will do the scenic and lighting design. The entire production will be stage-managed by Samantha Banner.

PDF created with pdfFactory trial version www.pdffactory.com

http://www.pdffactory.com

The Syringa Tree will be presented in arena staging for four performances, beginning April 13th through the 16th, at 7:30 pm nightly in the on-stage black box theatre in the Johnson Fine Arts Center on the campus of NSU. Tickets are $8.00, $7.00 for students and seniors. There are group rates available for groups of 10 or more. All seats are general seating and tickets will be available in the NSU bookstore beginning on Monday, April 4th, or by mail. Call the NSU Bookstore at 626- 2655 or the NSU Department of Theatre at 626-2563 for additional information.

About the Playwright

As both a writer and performer of The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award, and the Obie for both Performance and Best Play 2001. She shares these awards and her deepest gratitude with Matt Salinger, her producer and Larry Moss, her director. Pamela performed The Syringa Tree in Playhouse 91 for a year, and also toured it to The National Theatre in London. Ms. Gien majored in English and drama at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, studied acting in Paris and worked in a professional company in South Africa. A principal member of The American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge for four seasons, Pamela played Estrella in Life’s a Dream with Cherry Jones, Annabella in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore opposite Derek Smith, and Sonya in the premiere of David Mamet’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya opposite Christopher Walken. She played Gabriella in Ronald Ribman’s Sweettable at the Richelieu



and Angela in The King Stag, both directed by Andrei Serban. She also appeared in several productions directed by David Wheeler, including Gillette by William Hauptman and The Day Room by Don de Lillo. She played Stella/Ann in The End of the World with Symposium to Follow directed by Richard Foreman. She played Lavinia in Titus Andronicus for the Public Theatre’s New York Shakespeare Festival, Alicia in Piano by Anna Deveare Smith and starring opposite David Selby as Hannah Jelkes in Night of the Iguana at the LATC, for which she won a Drama-Logue Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Theatre. She has also performed in the New Works Festival at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles opposite J.T. Walsh, The Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and at the South Coast Repertory. Her TV appearance include roles in “Tales from the Crypt,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hunter,” “Secret Lives,” and “Into Thin Air.” She has appeared in the films Men Seeking Women with Will Ferrell, directed by Jim Millo and The Last Supper starring Bill Pullman, Jason Alexander, Charles Durning and Ron Pearlman. Random House has commissioned Pamela to write The Syringa Tree as a novel. She is writing the screenplay of The Syringa Tree, and has completed the screenplay for the upcoming film The Lily Field. The Syringa Tree is dedicated to her parents.

apart adj 1. SEPARATE, ISOLATED 2: holding different

opinions: DIVIDED- apart-ness n.

apartheid n. [Afrik, lit, separateness]; racial segregation, specif: a policy of segregation and political and economic

discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa



About the Writing of the Play (primary sources: Margot Adler’s interview on PBS’ FRESH AIR with Pamela Gien, and

“Apartheid Memories Find Their Audience” by Robin Finn, NY Times 2-23-2001)

Growing up during apartheid

Growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Pamela Gien witnessed first hand the affects of apartheid during the turbulent years before the end of white South African rule. She left South Africa in 1980 at the age of 26 and has since lived in the U.S. But it would take more than time and distance to erase those memories. She says,

I don’t know if it’s my psychological makeup or what it was. I really tried to hide [my homeland] away. I tried to get as far away from it as I possibly could. And I felt profoundly ashamed of that. When I started to write the play, I realized it wasn’t anger. It wasn’t hatred. It was a deep, deep well of grief and love and joy that I felt that I was unable to articulate. I really think I had a broken heart and didn’t know that I had a broken heart until I began to write the play. I would always try to avoid conversations about South Africa. And I had such a feeling of discomfort and dis-ease. And I think the reason for that was I didn’t know how to rationalize or make sense of it and really- I didn’t know what I felt ‘cause I’d put what I felt so far away in the back of my heart and mind.



And I think I did that because it was painful to me. And I didn’t realize at the time that’s what I was doing.

Unlike other white children of that time, she was not isolated from the blacks in her area. Her father was a doctor so

He had a wide cross-section of the population. So, he would see from the poorest black person in his consulting rooms to, you know, a white policeman who would tell stories of things that were going on in the townships that were not common knowledge or were certainly not in the daily newspapers because of the censorship of the media at that time. And then he would see boys who had come back from the border fighting in Angola, you know, young boys sent off to defend apartheid, basically. So we would hear the stories of that at the dinner table at night, and I would see the effect that that would have on my father, and I think where he wasn’t a person who went out, as a revolutionary, per se, and he was not somebody followed around by the secret police, I certainly did have a feeling as a child of nervousness about what was going on, and particularly some of the smaller events like somebody phoning the police because he was seeing a black child in the white section of the consulting rooms. So somebody would get upset about that. And I had this fear as a child that my father would be in some sort of trouble, that some trouble was imminent.

Connecting with her past

It was in Larry Moss’ acting class that Gien made this realization. It was during an exercise designed to force the actors in the workshop to present themselves without censoring the truth. Reaching into her past, Gien decided to tell the class a story about one horrible night in 1967,

It took place on the farm of my grandparents, which was up in the northern Transvaal, and it was an attack on the farm. It was something that was so unprecedented at the time and, sadly, something that has become an everyday occurrence now in Zimbabwe and other places in South Africa. But we believe that it was what they referred to as a terrorist who came across the border at nighttime and just walked into the farmhouse and attacked my grandparents. (Note: He was never caught.) My grandfather was 82 years old and really an extraordinary man, I think. In retrospect, I look back and see that he was a tremendous humanitarian and a very kind, kind person who, despite the laws of the time, allowed black families to live on his farm. And, you know, the memories I have of that place were so idyllic that I think when this



happened, it was such an extraordinary shock and certainly such a devastating thing for my mother- it was my mother’s father- that we moved on. We did not speak about it. We never went back there, and just basically got on with our lives.

Before telling her story, Gien was terrified that the members of this acting class (“Jason Alexander was in it!”) would laugh at her 10 year old’s evocation of the death of her beloved grandfather. What happened was the opposite- the class of actors was reduced to tears. That’s when Larry Moss insisted that this story be turned into a screenplay

Turning a story into a play The process of writing The Syringa Tree would eventually take about four years before it finally opened in Seattle in 1999. A friend observing her at work in performance told her that it was “like watching someone channel different people onto the stage or into the world. And it’s almost as though you see all those different characters.”

In a sense that’s the message of the play, the message of tolerance and truth and how we relate to one another, and that good and evil live in our hearts and not in the color of our skin. So if all those characters can exist and come out of one body, it’s a lovely idea in the end.

The character of Elizabeth Grace, the six-year old through whose eyes the audience sees the story, expresses many fears including those of separation and people who disappear.

When you’re surrounded by something, you don’t realize that that’s not the norm. You make it the norm for yourself. So I think it’s only in retrospect that I realize how frightened I actually was as a child. And I’m often asked how close I am to little Elizabeth in the play, and people say to me, “Were you really like that as a child?” And obviously I have no objective memory of what I was like as a child. I think the whole thrust of Elizabeth is about trying to take care of everybody, trying to make sure that everything is all right at every single minute. So there is no moment for her to rest. She’s in charge of keeping everybody safe in her own mind. So that keeps her busy, busy, busy.

There was a very real syringa tree in her backyard that, as a child, she had used as a “place of refuge.” As the play took shape, the tree became

a refuge for the black people trying to hide from the police, and also a sort of spiritual place. In African mythology one of the things that I loved so much was the story of how he spirits, when they die, pass into the leaves and the trees and the berries so that they’re with us always,



and around us. So to me, it just seemed an appropriate and really magical place, and then a special place for Elizabeth to hide, to go and think.

What started out as a story about Gien turned out to be much more than that when it was finally finished. When Larry Moss (who was now the director of the piece) told her “it’s not about you. It’s about being in service of something greater, something more important than any of us individually, and that is the idea of freedom.” Concerned that as a white actress how could she speak for the character of Moliseng, Moss countered “if you don’t speak for her and for those children who lost their lives, who will?” What Gien realized was that “as an artist… we’re here to channel things into the world, to bring ideas and whatever that mysterious process is, to be of service to something greater.”

Ready for Audiences The Syringa Tree had its premiere in 1999 at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle under the direction of Larry Moss, and opened in New York at the tiny Playhouse 91 in September of the following year. The show, while well reviewed, didn’t take off immediately. However it became must-see viewing for New York’s theatre community, and soon performers with TV platforms (Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell) were encouraging viewers to not miss this very special play. Soon audience members included Helen Hunt, Mike Nichols, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and even producer Matt Salinger’s notorious reclusive father (J.D. Salinger) stopped by. The play would continue for a success run, culminating in being named Best Play 2001 by the annual Obie Awards.

A Brief History of Events and Players in South Africa



Millennia BC The ancestors of the Khoikdoi and San are living in Southern

Africa AD 300 Ancestors of Bantu-speaking South Africans begin to settle in

South Africa 1652 The Dutch start a colony in Southern Africa at the Cape of Good

Hope 1658 The Dutch import slaves to the Cape from Angola and West Africa 1806 The British defeat the Dutch and the Xhosa and other African

peoples 1834 Britain ends slavery in all British colonies, including the Cape 1836 The Great Trek begins, as Afrikaaners leave the coast to

establish settlements 1838 Afrikaaners defeat Zulu warriors led by Dingaan at the Battle of

Blook River 1852-54 Afrikaaners form two republics, the Transvaal and the Orange

Free State 1880 The first of two Anglo-Boer Wars begins 1902 The second Anglo-Boer War ends with a British victory 1910 The Union of South Africa is formed 1912 The South African Native National Congress is formed to fight

discrimination. It is later renamed the African National Congress (ANC)



1913 Afrikaaners form the National Party to preserve their identities

under British rule 1914-19 World War I 1939-45 World War II 1948 The National Party comes to power and adopts a policy of

apartheid



1960 The Sharpeville Massacre; the ANC and other activist groups are

banned

1964 Nelson Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment



1976 Soweto uprising; riots break out in black townships across the

country

1977 P.W. Botha becomes prime minister, later president of South

Africa 1978 South Africa Council of Churches supports civil disobedience 1980 New serge of protests, strikes, and boycotts 1983 United Democratic Front is formed to oppose apartheid



1984 Uprisings in black townships; the government declares a state of

emergency; Desmond Tutu receives the Nobel Peace Prize 1986-87 Talks begin between Afrikaaners and the ANC 1986-95 Violent conflicts take place between Zulu supporters of Inkatha

and the ANC

1990 President F. W. de Klerk legalizes anti-apartheid groups and

releases Nelson Mandela 1991 Formal multi-party talks begin 1993 Agreement is reached on an interim constitution; a transitional

government meets; Nelson Mandela receives the Nobel Peace Prize

1994 South Africa holds its first democratic elections; Nelson Mandela elected as the first democratically elected president



1995 The Truth and Reconciliation Committee is established 1996 South Africa adopts a new constitution to take effect in 1997 1998 The Truth and Reconciliation Committee issues its report

Critical Responses for the Original Production “An extraordinary tour-de-force performance! An emotionally powerful love

story.” The New Yorker “Stuns with the power of a gut punch.”

The New York Times “Powerful play.”

The Wall Street Journal “A deceptive sweet simplicity haunts The Syringa Tree.”

The New York Post “ The story [is] a good one, reflecting as it does the larger issues in the convex

mirror of a representative yet idiosyncratic family. Obvious autobiography but deftly fictionalized, it is told with great sympathy but without a shred of self-pity or sentimentality.” New York Magazine

“Packs a punch rarely felt in the theatre. Don’t miss it.” Curtain Up “A deeply moving saga.” Newark Star-Ledger “The play is a rare convergence of text, performer and production values used

to evoke emotions that transform an audience’s perception of a history we’ve all heard of but know little about.” ShowBusinessWeekly.Com

“The play succeeds on the merit of an exceptionally moving story.”

Show Business “Astonishing… Affecting… (with) a dramatic and heartbreaking conclusion.”

Associated Press “A remarkable play, a touching drama.” United Press International

Resources

Script: The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien, Dramatists Play Service, New York, 2002 (ISBN: 0-8222-1792-9)



(Note: The above title is in print

and is available through Amazon.com and other on-line retailers)



By Pamela Gien Synopsis About NSU Theatreâ€™s Production

Documents

Transcript of By Pamela Gien Synopsis About NSU Theatreâ€™s Production