Stage Preview: Pittsburgh ties pull director to Kuntu and 'Sarafina!'
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The circle of life spirals onward in many ways.
Where: Kuntu Repertory Theatre at Alumni Hall (former Masonic Temple), 4227 Fifth Ave., Oakland.
When: Through Feb. 10; Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 4 p.m.; Feb. 3, 1 p.m.
Tickets: $15-$20; discounts; 412-624-7298.
For Olusegun Ojewuyi, a native Nigerian, it has led quite naturally to the University of Pittsburgh's Kuntu Repertory Theatre, where he is now directing the ebullient and uplifting South African musical "Sarafina!," on stage for the first time here since the post-Broadway tour in 1991.
The connectors in Ojewuy's circle include Wole Soyinka, August Wilson, Yale University, Tiffany Ellis and Kuntu founder and lodestar, Vernell Lillie.
After college in Nigeria, Ojewuyi (oh-jay-wee; in person he prefers Segun, pronounced sha-GUN) helped found the Gangan Theater, named after the "talking drum." Without a regular space or income, they did well, even touring to Europe. But by 1995, "politics got so dicey, I had to leave," he says, partly because he had worked for the United States Information Agency and been an adviser to the American embassy on culture and education.
Before that, on his first trip to the United States in 1989 as part of a small group of directors from all over the world given a tour of American theater, he saw "Sarafina!" on Broadway and also visited Yale. There, his connection with a Nigerian mentor, Nobel Prize-winner Soyinka, recommended him to the head of Yale drama, Lloyd Richards, who was also Wilson's director.
Two of Ojewuyi's college mentors had also studied theater at Yale. So when he needed to leave Nigeria, he applied and was accepted. There, he met Wilson, who regularly worked on his plays with the Yale Repertory Theater. And in his class was Ellis, an effervescent Pittsburgher and Pitt grad who kept talking about Kuntu Rep.
On the eve of graduation in 1998, Ojewuyi directed Soyinka's "The Road' as his thesis production, and Wilson and his new stage director, Marion McClinton, who happened to be meeting at Yale, came to see it. As Ojewuyi recalls, Wilson "waited for me after the show and said, 'I have something for you.' "
That "something" was an invitation to come to Pittsburgh to be McClinton's assistant director on the world premiere of Wilson's "King Hedley II," with which the Public Theater was to inaugurate the O'Reilly Theater. So there he was in fall 1999, sitting with Wilson on one side and McClinton on the other.
"I'd call that my second major education," Ojewuyi says. "During rehearsal breaks, August would tell me stories of these characters, and he gave me tours of the Hill. That was a big deal for me."
He went on to serve as assistant director and dramaturg and also act in a McClinton production of Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horseman." He then decided he would teach and went to Southern Illinois University, where he now heads the MFA program in directing.
There, he determined to write a book, now under way, on Wilson and Soyinka, and also to organize a major conference on them in Nigeria. The latter has yet to happen, but he did organize a Wilson celebration at Southern Illinois in spring 2005, focused on "Fences." Wilson was to attend but sent word he had to attend first to something else -- which turned out to be the discovery of his fatal liver cancer.
In his place, Wilson sent Ojewuyi a final gift: He suggested Ojewuyi invite Lillie. And that's why he is now at Kuntu, directing "Sarafina!"
"I sit and review these connections, how one thread leads to another," he says with wonder.
"I come from a society where [with a career in theater] you condemn yourself to poverty. The art of theater has taken me everywhere I have been and enriched my life, but what I do is also a service -- and that's what I see in Kuntu."
Thanks to his Yale friend Ellis, he knew before he came that Kuntu has "built a very credible legacy with the right vision and focus." And in Lillie he has found "a wonderful producer [who] respects artists regardless of their ages."
Although Kuntu regularly uses student, community and professional actors, "Sarafina!" draws especially on "the important resource of young lives." It must, since it is the musical story of the students who began the 1976 anti-apartheid riots in Soweto, told from the point of view of Sarafina, a high school student who sparks the protest.
"The children became the energy that moved a people, a country and the world," Ojewuyi says. Their protest led soon to American and British sanctions and eventually to the release of Nelson Mandela. "Unlike many musicals, this one takes on a powerful subject." In contrast, Ojewuyi dismisses the movie version as "Sarafina goes to Hollywood."
The student actors, singers, dancers and musicians Kuntu has recruited come from many countries, including South Africa, the Congos, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Swaziland. "It's wonderful blending their energies," Ojewuyi says. "The beauty is in the challenge."
First Published January 25, 2007 12:00 am
