Sing Into The Dragon's Mouth

- learn to survive on coffee - work like a plough horse - bring ink

I'm going to do this from memory, because it was so long ago. I was still a teenage, living in Johannesburg, South Africa, the nation still caught in the spit and bile of apartheid and I was looking for a job, any job that got me closer to the wondrous music of the townships and the crazy buzz of theater.

I found both. Not sure how. Probably saw a notice on a bulletin board.

I was enrolled in the University of Witwatersrand at the time, in the Anthropology department, but I never really took to the place or the study or the discipline. There was an exciting world out there and I wanted to get to it. Cliche, I know, but the truth all the same.

Downtown in the Jo'burg, I walked up a narrow flight of stairs and stepped into the upside down world of Dorkay House. The Phoenix Players were putting on a show called Phiri!; crazy show, African musicians, dancers, sets, band, wild, passionate, over the top, directed by Barney Simon. I signed on as a production assistant, which was jump-in-the-deep-end-of-the-pool time. If I didn't know what I was doing, I learned my first lesson in high-pressure dead-line production. Fake it until you figure it out. Theater production is a lot of adapting to different stages, different performances, different ideas, moods, vibes, tempers and talent, so adapt or perish. Useful lesson that.

My very first day on the job I was sent up to Pretoria, the capital city, about a fifty mile drive north. In Pretoria, I needed to secure permissions for the African cast of Phiri to be in Jo-burg to do the show. We were putting it on at Wits, the university. This was my very first task in theater and I was determined to get it right.

What I soon discovered was that there were acres and acres of rules, regulations and forms in Afrikaner run South Africa. Afrikaners seemed to relish it all, the bureaucracy, orders, procedures, signs, directions, laws, codes, all wrapped in an arcane language, guaranteed to lead to mundane and constant violations. I knew I had to be careful and precise, not exactly my long suit, then or now.

I went to a room and waited on line, and then followed a police officer to another room and a stack of forms were put in front of me. I was told to fill them out. I had the names and info in my pocket and I spread it all out in front of me. As he was leaving, the police officer, tall, close cropped hair, tight, fit, mean looking son of a bitch, told me to fill them out in triplicate. No copier, nothing. He wanted me to fill out each form three times in ink.

"Make it neat," he said, as he left me there.

That's it, that's my introduction to a lifetime of theater, opera, TV, music, you name it, I've produced it all, but it began back in Pretoria, South Africa, me sitting alone in a big room for hours, painstakingly filling out form after form, in ink, no mistakes allowed or I had to start again. I don't think they even checked them and the policeman gave me a sneer when I dropped the stack on his desk.

"Why'd those Bantu want to put on a show?" he said.

I didn't know what to say, I really didn't. I was a week or two past my eighteenth birthday, alone in the middle of a marble maze of a hard core nasty volk and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

"You should come," I said and turned and left. I didn't run, but when I got back to the car my hands were shaking. No reason, no threats, but something about it unnerved me. I remember it to this day.

Phiri! was an incredible hit. We played it in Jo'burg, then took it to some townships. Striking and adopting the sets for the different township theaters was an amazing lesson in how to make sets work on different stages. It was a big show, maybe twenty singers, a corp of dancers, a big band, lights, sets, sound, costumes, props, a real deal Broadway level production. I loved it. We worked like dogs. Perfect. I was totally in love with theater, production, the work, hard and long, all of it. I was home.

In the townships, I experienced something I never heard again. When the curtain went up, the audience was noisy, commenting on the show, the story, discussing the merits of this singer or that dancer, talking directly to the cast as they performed. To this day, I've never seen more audience participatory performances than I did all those years ago in the African townships. The theater was vital, important, real, connected to the audience in ways most productions can only dream. And it was more than even that.

In the daily horror of the apartheid era, when the oppression was like a steel collar around the throats of entire nations of peoples, the cast of Phiri sang and danced their way past the jack boots and lifted the hearts of so many, night after night.

Right from the beginning of my life in production, I learned the most valuable lesson of all. Connect to your audience. Make it mean something. Change your world and theirs. And if the work you're doing doesn't achieve that, then it's probably not worth doing.