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.