During early television days, the long-defunct DuMont network broadcast Frontier Theatre Monday to Friday at 6pm. The content was westerns, probably because Hopalong Cassidy movies and the like were easily acquired low-budget fare.
The insistent program came to mind when I attended Dark Moon, the already widely-touring Fix+Foxy Production in which South Africans Mandla Gaduka, Katlego Kaygee Letsholonyana, Lillian Tshabalala-Malulyck, Bongani Bennedict Masango, Siyambonga Alfred Mdubeki, Joe Young, and Thulani Zwane expend themselves like nobody’s business for 110 explosive minutes.
They quite pointedly represent South African television watchers who had a similar but different exposure to westerns in a society when TVs were rare and around which those without them gathered when invited and formed their own impressions and opinions of what the genre revealed about sprawling 19th-century American territory.
What impressed me about the hyperkinetic piece — written and directed by the Danish Tue Biering, co-directed and choreographed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu — is its recognizing the marked difference between the lessons learned by American youth of the DuMont days and the takeaways that the South Africans reaped at a later date.
Put succinctly, stateside viewers were indulged in visions of what could be distilled to a Cowboys-and-Indians ethic. They (we?) were shown partial truths indelibly integrated, a template for games played in local schoolyards. In contrast, South Africans were exposed to an up-close-and-personal look at white dominance of a country where other immigrants — slaves and the Chinese imported as cheap labor to lay the cross-country railroad — were seen as second-class citizens, or worse. (Is there any need to note it’s a cock-eyed assessment too often enduring today?)
Biering, starting work on an improvisational piece, swiftly realized his ideal approach was presenting a brutally outsized, extreme South African take on the Wild West as it emerged from the mid 1800s until 1890 when there was no more frontier to conquer. The outcome is a startling theatrical gambit.
On Johan Kølkjær’s truncated football-field set, the seven-strong — and I mean strong, athletic, indefatigable — cast members enact the sequential history of the West as initially populated by immigrants for whom great opportunities existed beyond the east coast.
Subsequently, Biering shows aggressive newcomers violently appropriating land from the indigenous Indian tribes and, once displacing them, fighting each other. He progresses to the cross-county railroads encouraging adjacent towns, law-abiding populations at last taming the outlaws.
Not so by the way, the actors often play the scenes in white face and ill-fitting, clownish yellow wigs, yet another cynical commentary.
Reporting that the actors charge around enough to wear grooves in the ground and constantly change costumer Camilla Lind’s myriad costumes is an understatement. In the many gun battles and killings, the ensemble members repeatedly run from one end of the playing area to the other, returning to run the length again and then again, sometimes in awkwardly executed slow motion.
As often as not, they fall to the floor, sometimes remaining for seconds before being carted away. One galoot is even tarred and feathered. It might not be inaccurate to estimate that they eagerly pass as much as a quarter of their time lying down, shot to Wild-West death.
Doing so, they enact in-your-face sequences that eventually are stretched beyond their worth. Yes, Dark Noon with all the running, et cetera, is too long. Still, the contexts can’t be dismissed. Among additional and quite specific depictions are the mention of the bison eradication, the introduction of branding, the inclusion of a slave auction, the 1849 Gold Rush, and the growth of towns as represented by frames standing for offices, homes, jails, and banks ripe for robberies.
There’s even reference to homosexuality, in the absence of women, as accepted practice. Indeed, the phenomenon is discussed here in contrast to its being pretty much ignored in most Hollywood films exploiting the outlandishly vibrant era. (Maybe Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is a belated exception.)
For wary patrons, it should be mentioned that audience participation is a constant element. Not infrequently the actors take audience members by the hand, usually from the front rows of the bleacher sections surrounding three sides of the much-trod St. Ann’s Warehouse stage. Those docilely herded to join in the fun(?) become pioneering families, churchgoers, threatened bystanders.
Indeed, audience members are the ones auctioned on the slave block. The night I was there, a tall and solid middle-aged man was sold for one dollar; an attractive young women went for plenty more.
Lastly on this eye-opening offering — where the remark “See ourselves as others see us” surely pertains — is the title’s origin. Maybe it’s merely intended to stress a dark phase in often-dark American history annals. More likely, it’s a spin on the 1952 Gary Cooper-Grace Kelly starrer, High Noon, often considered the best Hollywood western ever released. As of now, both High Noon and Dark Noon are must-sees, the former as perfect of its kind, the latter flawed but endlessly insistent
Dark Noon opened June 17, 2024, at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through July 7. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
