De Wet: Plays One (Oberon Books)

Rating:
Summary: Undiscovered Country
Review: It is a crime that Reza de Wet is not better known in the United States. For over 10 years, she has been considered one of South Africa's most important playwrights - and this volume of plays will make most theatre folks understand why, or I'll eat one of my cowboy boots. The plays in this trilogy are set during the early decades of the last century, far far out on the range and around the little towns of the Orange Free State. Aesthetically, her style could be described as gothic realism: desperate lives take on dream-like qualities as they seek to make their peace with desperate places (think Strindberg meets Sam Shepard meets Marina Carr). Women will be heartened to hear that de Wet has created some unforgettable roles for them here. Theatre audiences, more generally, will be alternately tickled and troubled by de Wet's darkly comic rendering of wounded lives. ("Local Color" humor flows into real pain and back again.) And unlike some of Athol Fugard's plays - South Africa's best-known playwright - you do not need a crash-course in the history and theory of apartheid to get inside of this world (it is probably de Wet's lack of an obvious political agenda that is responsible for her neglect here and elsewhere). I know that this review reads more like boosterism than criticism, but that is how excited I am by Reza de Wet. After brushing up on your J.M. Coetzee, read her next.