BWW Reviews: APT's Sensational THE ISLAND Honors Fugard's Timeless Plea for Political Justice

In a tribute to Athol Fugard and his 1973 Tony and Drama Desk Award winning play, American Players Theatre (APT) in their Touchstone Theater stages The Island. When first produced by Fugard in South Africa, the play attempted collaboration between the black and white actors and/or prisoners in a theatrical protest agianst the country's injust apartheid policies. The original actors and co-writers, John Kani and Winston Nishona, were actually imprisoned on South Africa's Robben Island where the country's eventual preseident Nelson Mandela spent more than 25 years. During this period in time, even the name Robben Island was prohibited from being spoken outloud.

In APT's entrhalling production, LeShawn Banks plays John while Chiké Johnson assumes the role of his cellmate Winston. While John, who was imprisoned for membership in a politicallly banned organization, Winston burned his "pass card" in front of the white police, a serous offense. John's early release from his sentence causes an emotional rift between the two mates in Cell 42, often also handcuffed together, as the two men call 'married,' for the past several years of their prison sentence.

What transpires betwen John and Winston becomes a bonding over how their wives and children were left behind in New Brighton, for the injustice of choosing personal freedom over political laws. While the play may be spoken primarily in English with added Afrikaans and Xhosa dialects, the meaning remains clear. With admiration for the actors, the audience with immerse themselves in the play and understand the meaing to this deep relationship forged on a forlorn island. Aprison where two black men are forced to run and work until the point of exhaustion determined by the white guards--at APT, Nick Ehlinger and Alistair Sewell.

The only hope for these prisoners is an ability to produce plays in prison, and John along with Winston choose Sophocles Antigone, written in approximately 440 B.C. Antigone was sentenced to death by King Creon of Thebes for burying her brother after he died as a traitor, a crime of her conscious that honors her belief in God, a higher power. She asserts in her defense to the King, and Johnson radiates pride in playing the guilty Antigone, that she needs to obey her own conscious and that she must be true to God above, to bury her brother because his body belong to God, instead of obeying Creon's man-made laws.

While Fugard's themes resonate with the racial protests currently underway in America's cities, John, Winston and Antigone represent a broad spectrrum of poeple imprisoned or sentenced for crimes against manmade laws instead of their god-given rights. While audiences may miss the greater meaning to Antigone and Creon's eventual downfall, a plot in where Creon wins the right to rule Thebes, remains King, yet loses everything important in his life including all the love of his family. At what cost do political systems maintain their strict rules? At what cost does the constiuency rebel against the injustice of their rulers?

Derrick Sanders directs this primarily two person cast with flaming emotion and fierce humor--all based on actual experiences within the South African prison. Yu Shibagaki's scenic design places the two prisoners on a square metal slab, cold and hard, which can be written on with chalk. A bucket, two blankets and a pair of tin cups transform the one play, The Island, into Antigone with a seamless wonder. The only warmth on set emanates from the brotherhood Johnson and Banks transfer to each other and the audience in performances wrung with affection, honesty, hostility, playfulness and necessary humor. Emotions culled from Cell 42 where "Time passes so slowly when you have something to wait for."

This powerful, provacative play, presented in a no-intermission format, touches every sense in the intimate Touchstone---from the visceral sounds of the prisoners heavy breathing and lifting sand bags at the beginning of the play, to the sweat seen on the Khaki shirts, and Antiogone's performance, Johnson, on stage when she is sentenced to death by Creon, Banks, and says: "I share my love instead of my hate."

Perhaps in the goodnees and righteousness of brotherhood, of the world's men and women or what is better named humanity, the audience asks who is my brother or sister, and whate are my responsibilities to him or her? In these critical 21st century times, the world's civil unrest recently abhored in France, Libya, Syria and America to name only a few, appears as a world on the verge of undoing where time waits no longer. The audeince might contemplrate these words when walking down the hilll in Spring Green away from this stellar production of Fugard, Kani and Nishona's timelessly compelling story: "To honor those things to which honor belongs."

American Players Theatre present Athol Fugard's The Island at the Touchstone Theatre through August. For information, picnic lunches, or tickets please call: 608.588.2361 or americanplayers.org.

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