TheatreFIRST

THEATREFIRST RECENTLY LOST its home at the Oakland YWCA, but its itinerant status hasn’t prevented the company from starting its new season on the right foot. With renowned South African playwright Paul Slabolepszy’s Mooi Street Moves, a one-act post-apartheid duet, artistic director Clive Chafer introduces Bay Area audiences to another well-wrought drama from the greater English-speaking world.

This contemporary urban tale, engagingly presented and buoyed by an understated humor, takes place in a once affluent and segregated district of Johannesburg now transformed by the fall of apartheid into an inner-city hodgepodge marked by poverty and crime. Henry Stone (Joseph Foss), a naive white bumpkin, has returned after six years to his brother’s apartment only to find it occupied by Stix Letsebe (David Skillman), a streetwise black man with a roomful of stolen goods. Arriving alone in the world and penniless, having been taken in by a grifter, the terrified Henry responds only gradually to Stix’s gestures of hospitality amid the city’s new social calculus. Stix finally convinces him to stay until they locate his brother, meanwhile pulling Henry into the trade and teaching him the rules of life on the lively Mooi Street, where “middlemen” like Stix hock their wares.

The play has its melodramatic and sentimental side, but Skillman and Foss fix our attention immediately and hold it to the end. Chafer gets the most from their complex relationship, which manifests itself beautifully in the continual jockeying for position, as well as the boyish clowning and tussling that go on between them. The actors also convincingly render the two befuddling accents and dialects that underscore the cultural chasm between Stix and Henry. At the same time, they do a superb job of making us believe how readily their mutual longing for friendship and aid not only bridges that divide but also brings them in a brotherly bond as authentic and necessary to each as the one that originally drew Henry to Johannesburg.

Anyone who has seen a play in the elegantly molded space at the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club, where TheatreFIRST has taken up temporary residence, will have to admit what a fine job set designer Christina La Sala has does in turning it into a shabby, low-budge “Joburg” apartment. Bordered on one side by a rumpled bed and on the other by a wall-sized stack of boxed appliances, Stix’s modest digs betray a frighteningly authentic species of male housekeeping. Together with Dale Altvater’s moody lighting and Greg Scharpen’s discreet sound design, it all serves wonderfully to focus an already intimate stage on two magnetic performances.

BY MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE

The girl’s name is Josephine, but her English parents call her Joe Egg after a saying of her very English, very suburban-provincial grandmother’s: "Just sitting around like Joe Egg." Young Josephine does nothing but sit around; she has cerebral palsy.

The parents, Sheila and Brian (”Bri”), made the decision about 10 years earlier to care for her, though she would never be, as Sheila puts it, more than "a kind of living parsnip." Peter Nichols’ graceful and well-formed drama, based on his own experience raising a child with cerebral palsy, dates from the ’60s, but it’s been revived twice on Broadway, most recently last year with Eddie Izzard. TheatreFirst’s small-scale production at its new Mills College home has a surprisingly intimate, real-life feel; director Clive Chafer — with the energetic help of Simon Vance as Bri and Cynthia Bassham as Sheila — has re-created the mood of 1960s London with touches as subtle as clothing (Bri’s elbow-patched coat) and makeup (Sheila’s blue eye shadow and straight hair). The show does lose momentum in the second act, in part because Howard Dillon and Jessica Powell, as a pair of snobbish upper-middle-class Londoners, put on broad caricature performances that might work in a middling BBC sitcom but seem out of place here. Wanda McCaddon, though, as Bri’s petty fussing mother (who uses the Joe Egg phrase), is brilliant, and so is the young Miranda Swain, who seems to have studied cerebral-palsied girls in order to play one with so much vivid sympathy. After almost four decades, Joe Egg has not lost its power to shock or entertain; it’s a witty and nimble exploration of what even humanists mean by “human”.

sfweekly.com | originally published: October 6, 2004