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AIDS inhibitor: Pieter-Dirk Uys is a clown on a crusade
– Carolyn Clay, The Boston Phoenix, 14 January 2005
South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys did not sit back and put his feet up after
20 years of serving as a thorn in the lily-white side of apartheid. Instead, the
59-year-old crusader clown turned from what he deems one lethal "virus" to another,
taking on the AIDS pandemic that threatens to kill more South Africans than the nation’s
dictatorial apartheid regime, out of business 10 years now, ever did. In his one-man
performance piece Foreign Aids, which won a 2004 Obie and is now introducing Uys
to Cambridge audiences, he gingerly places one foot on American soil to get in a
few digs but keeps the other solidly planted in the AIDS education mission he embarked
on four years ago, taking his frank, funny, graphically informative advocacy of safe
sex into South African schools of every sort. Indeed, the piece ends on a note of
triumph when Uys encounters an 18-year-old man in a mall who remembers the entertainer’s
comical, condom-pushing evangelism. Asked how he is, the youth replies exultantly,
"I’m still alive!"
Whatever his intent, Uys on stage is a far cry from the surgeon-general. He enters
in the guise of his alter ego, glittering Afrikaner matron Evita Bezuidenhout, self-described
"most famous white woman in South Africa" and a sort of Dame Edna Everage with political
chops. Like the Divine Mrs. E., whom Australians and Brits believe in so wholeheartedly
that actor Barry Humphries’s biography of his creation has sometimes been found on
non-fiction shelves, Mrs. Bezuidenhout is a substantive enough entity to have addressed
South Africa’s Parliament and interviewed Nelson Mandela on TV. Making her debut
in snowy Cambridge, she purred that she felt at home because "everything outside
is so white." She apologized for apartheid, silkily expressing her regret that "it
didn’t work." And by mouthing her support for the present South African government
and its blind eye toward HIV/AIDS, she delivered Uys’s first skewer to the ribs of
current president Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s handpicked successor, who has angered Uys
by refusing to acknowledge or address the pandemic.
Indeed, some have criticized Foreign Aids for being too serious. In the words of
Calvin Trillin, who profiled Uys for the New Yorker last May, "there are those in
South Africa, some of them longstanding fans of Pieter-Dirk Uys, who believe that
with Foreign Aids he has allowed himself to forget the sacred recipe governing the
balance of tickles and punches necessary for an entertainer to hold his audience."
It’s true that Uys’s righteous anger over the AIDS crisis makes this outing more
urgent than silly. He does not seem to be kidding when he remarks that "once upon
a time, not so long ago, we had an apartheid regime in South Africa that killed people.
Now we have a democratic government that just lets them die." And in a chilling (if
not technically impressive) ventriloquist routine in which ex-president and apartheid
iron fist P.W. Botha manipulates a Charlie McCarthy–esque Mbeki, Uys goes so far
as to suggest that the government’s failure to curb the pandemic might be a deliberate
attempt to — as Scrooge would say — decrease the surplus population.
This is not to say that Uys, a mischievous mimic and delighter in drag, is all punch
and no punch line. Identifying laughter as a great dismantler of fear, he lampoons
a finger-waggling, pooched-lipped Botha, who sounds eerily like the terror-invoking
Bush-ites and considers democracy "too good to share with just anyone." Uys even
sends up his idols, Desmond Tutu (a woolly-wigged man in a "purple dress" sporting
more jewelry than Mrs. Bezuidenhout) and Mandela, who "came out of his dark cloud
to share with us its silver lining, along with some of the most hideous ethnic shirts
ever made." He also imparts the confidences of Evita Bezuidenhout’s estranged younger
sister, Bambi Kellermann, the glam widow of a fugitive Nazi who abused her, she throatily
tells us, for refusing to give him a blow job. Tossing her platinum curls, crossing
her gold-spiked-heeled legs, and taking a bit of ash from the bum’s urn on her long
red fingernail, she proceeds to do so.
Inaugurating the American Repertory Theatre’s new 300-seat black-box theater at Zero
Arrow Street on a simple raised stage strewn with the plastic-bagged detritus of
his various personae, Uys is a man of low production values. He developed the habit,
he told the Phoenix, of changing costumes on stage back in the days of apartheid,
when he feared he’d be arrested if he left the stage to apply his nails or his eyelashes.
(Perhaps because he’s a white Afrikaner whom some in power regarded as a jester,
Uys was never jailed.) Given the current democracy he clearly cherishes, Uys probably
has to dodge fewer bullets these days. But brandishing a fierce sincerity and a fistful
of condoms, when it comes to HIV/AIDS, he’s still shooting.
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