THEATER REVIEW : ‘Soweto’s Burning’: The Roots of Fire

Is that thunder or gunfire in the not-distant-enough distance? An ominous rumbling punctuates the action in “Soweto’s Burning,” Ross Kettle’s often gripping play about a young British woman living in South Africa in the midst of apartheid’s violent death throes. The woman, a white dancer living in Johannesburg, befriends a deaf black man while her soldier boyfriend is away on duty.

Joseph (Larry Whitt) operates the spotlight at a cabaret where Emma (Emily Ruiz) dances. She first invites him home because it is past curfew, too late for him to return to Soweto, the city’s black annex. This simple social act becomes instantly fraught. First produced in L.A. in 1992, “Soweto’s Burning” is at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

In Ruiz’s appealing performance, Emma is a generous and curious young woman, but terribly nervous, as the generous and curious must be in apartheid South Africa (the year is not specified). Joseph (Larry Whitt) is nervous too. His natural graciousness turns into a kind of subservience, which only makes Emma serve him tea more nervously than ever. He teaches her sign language; they establish a tentative trust and both seem to cherish the achievement.

On their second night together, Emma invites Joseph into her bed--she doesn’t like to see him sleeping on the floor. In bed they are like two children playing doctor with respect and wonder. He is amazed that her skin glows in the moonlight; she wants to touch his hair. If there is a sexual curiosity, it remains nascent.

This idyll is brutally ended by the return of Emma’s boyfriend Steph (a snarling Colin Cox), a soldier on AWOL, a man who hates apartheid but who has only been coarsened by it. At this point the play becomes both more and less dramatic--a sudden frenzy of action is interrupted by three confessional, internal monologues, one for each character. Whitt is particularly good as well as physically impressive here: Joseph, on his knees, re-enacts chasing a small boy in the street during a strafing in a futile attempt to protect him.

Mostly, though, the monologues are performed with a kind of breathless urgency. Co-directed by Whitt and Jeffrey Anderson-Gunter (who supplies the voice of Joseph), the performances are kept at a very high pitch throughout. The directors seem to feel the need to underline an already emphatic play, one with a credibility problem at its melodramatic climax.

At its best, “Soweto’s Burning” illuminates the hell of living in a place in which goodness is extremely difficult. Emma describes South Africa as a moral abyss where “we have to jump into the blackness and hope to God it’s the right way.” Though occasionally schematic in his writing, Kettle delineates the terror of moral blindness for all--black, white, and outsiders who have the bad luck to be caught in the middle.

* “Soweto’s Burning,” The Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, Thursday-Friday, 8 p.m. Ends April 1. $12. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 2 hours.