Keen ‘Songs and Satire’ Powered by Observations : Cabaret: South African Maggie Soboil, now an L.A. resident, takes her one-woman show of humor and commentary to the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library tonight.

When Maggie Soboil immigrated to the United States from her native South Africa, a black friend and fellow playwright was forced to pose as her maid just to tell her goodby.

“I had already boarded the ship, and she had come all the way down to the harbor to say goodby, but they wouldn’t let her on because she was black,” Soboil said. “So she pleaded with them, saying, ‘But I want to say goodby to my madam!’ and they let her on.”

Similar incidents were what caused Soboil, who brings her satirical-musical one-woman show to the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library tonight, to leave.

“Although things like that happened all the time, there was one incident that was the last straw,” she said. “It was 1975, and I was riding a bus in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. It was raining, and the bus driver refused to let a pregnant black woman aboard because it was a white-only bus. I nearly went berserk.”

Still, it wasn’t easy leaving the country in which she was born. “Friendships forged across the color line were especially dear, because the odds against them were so great. Plus, living in a place where there is a lot of anger and a definite cause to fight for can be very energizing. It’s not good to be in a place where life is apathetic,” she said.

After leaving South Africa, Soboil settled in New York City, where she joined the La Mama theater group. Fatima Dike, the friend who posed as Soboil’s maid, eventually came to the United States to participate in the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the two teamed in the mid-1980s to produce “Glass House,” an off-Broadway play about apartheid.

“Fatima and I were once part of The Space theater, the only multiracial theater group in South Africa,” Soboil said. “It was like an island without apartheid, and magical, outrageous things happened there. But in the U.S., there was very little awareness about the situation in South Africa back then, and we had to preface every play with an explanation of what was going on. Thankfully, that’s changed, and so have things in South Africa,” she said.

Since coming to the United States, Soboil also has teamed up with Elsa Joubert, an Afrikaner who wrote “Poppie Nongena,” a play Soboil appeared in about the politicization of a young South African black woman that was staged in New York, in London and at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.

Soboil’s own sketches and cabaret-style dramatic evenings always have incorporated serious social and political issues with a strong dose of humor. In fact, she’s been referred to as “the South African Carol Burnett” and “a woman with a face somewhere between Shari Lewis and Phyllis Diller.”

Parody is her strong point, and she says her goal is to awaken the audience to the bizarre and often bittersweet occurrences of everyday life. Her characters include a phony clairvoyant, a female Bernard Goetz and a woman appointed ambassador to Suriname as consolation after the Reagans’ dog urinated on her petunias.

Her San Juan appearance will include several characters she dreamed up after living in Los Angeles for the past two years.

“These characters form in the deep recesses of my brain, based on all the things I constantly overhear and observe,” Soboil said. “Los Angeles feels like home because the climate and vegetation here is very similar to South Africa, plus it’s still segregated even though there’s a rich ethnic diversity,” she said. “People in Beverly Hills know very little about South Central, and most have never been there.”

Soboil, who once lived in London and starred in the BBC television series “Maggie & Frank” with Frank Lazarus, is now accompanied musically by her husband, jazz musician Eddie Reyes. His Afro-Cuban jazz group, Dry Rain, performs around Los Angeles.

“Although my sketches always have a serious side, people should expect to laugh,” said Soboil, who will do sketches on drive-by shootings, 10-year-old pyromaniacs and a children’s storyteller who hates kids, among others.

“It’s a combination of new material and some classics. I’m constantly attuned to the bizarre and always scribbling down situations and bits of dialogue I overhear. If you just keep cool and inconspicuous, people reveal some amazing things about themselves,” she said.

“Songs and Satire of Maggie Soboil” will be presented tonight at 7 and 9 p.m in La Sala Auditorium, San Juan Capistrano Regional Library, 31495 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Donation: $2. (714) 493-1752.