Actors find inspiration and healing

The best actors go to great lengths to infuse their work -- their characters, their performances, their art -- with truth.

Claire Tyler took her quest all the way to South Africa.

Though she's all alone on stage in The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien's beautiful, shattering memory play about growing up in a beloved country brutalized by apartheid, Tyler must summon almost two dozen believable characters onto GableStage's wide swath of a playing area.

Yes, she's helped by lighting, sound effects, music and one bit of "scenery" -- a child's swing, hanging from the branches of an unseen tree (the Syringa, a fruit-bearing member of the mahogany family, is the central character's refuge in the play). But conjuring the story's magic depends on the most exhilarating kind of theatrical collaboration: The actor's skill has to make the audience "see" 23 distinct characters and more than 30 locations. It is, says GableStage director Joseph Adler, "truly theater of the imagination."

And in this case, Tyler's collaborators will be both the company's regular audiences and some 10,000 Miami-Dade middle and high school students who will see the show at special performances.

MORE THAN A PLAY

For both its creator, an actress-turned-playwright who has taken her story of mourning and celebration home to South Africa, and for the subsequent performers who, like Tyler, have been given the opportunity for a tour de force performance by Gien's challenging script, The Syringa Tree isn't just a play. It's a passion.

The Bahamas-born, British-educated Tyler, for example, began her work on the show by researching South Africa on the Internet. She wound up spending more than two months outside Johannesburg where she helped build a Global Village Habitat International home for Gemma and Vusi Thleso and their five sons. The cost to Tyler? Around $3,000 for travel and living expenses. The experience of giving to others as she soaked up the sights, sounds, smells of South Africa, and what it allowed her to bring to the play? Priceless and "all-consuming," says the 28-year-old actress, who graduated from Florida International University in 2000.

For Gien, who is just winding up a run of her Obie Award-winning play in Cape Town, the 10 years since she hesitantly told her acting class what became one of the play's most tragic stories have been a time of healing and a deeper self-knowledge.

"I had a huge unresolved place of sadness about this country and things I'd witnessed as a child," says the 47-year-old Gien by phone from South Africa, the country she abandoned for America in the 1980s. "A well of grief opened up, and I understood this place I longed for so deeply and missed so profoundly... [The Syringa Tree] has allowed me to grieve, to remember and to feel joy again in the magic of being an African child."

A CHILD'S EYES

The play's mixture of autobiography and invention is told largely from the point of view of six-year-old Elizabeth Grace, a white South African of British descent, a child who looks through innocent eyes at dramas both political and personal - at the adored black nanny who must keep her own little daughter hidden away, because it would be illegal for the girl to live in a white home; at the liberal Jewish father, a doctor whose white patients grow furious at his compassionate treatment of black ones; and later at the loss of a white relative and a black friend, both victims of the violence apartheid left in its wake.

Understand, many other qualities - an inviting playfulness, tenderness, humor - dangle like the Syringa berries from the play's canopy of emotions. But it is the feelings flowing from South Africa's long, deadly oppression of its black population - the rage, the loss, the guilt - that give The Syringa Tree its intensity and power.

Original producer Matt Salinger, who shepherded The Syringa Tree through its developmental stages, a Seattle tryout, a two-year New York run and subsequent success in London, major American cities and now South Africa, wasn't even looking for a play when he was invited to watch Gien perform it all those years ago in director Larry Moss' acting class.

"I was just dumbstruck and mesmerized. It was just her, and her talent shone like a beacon," says Gien's producer, the son of reclusive novelist J.D. Salinger (and, during his earlier acting career, the guy who played the title role in the 1991 movie Captain America). "I couldn't not support her."

The play's power, he believes, is that it's "so alive. It's like a feverish dream conjured by a hyperactive 6-year-old girl. It mainlines into your central emotional core. It blasts past your defenses."

To harness that power, Tyler has to use her malleable voice, a precisely delineated physicality and an array of telling gestures and accents to bring to life the precocious Elizabeth, her melancholy mother Eugenie and compassionate father Isaac; Salamina, Elizabeth's black nanny, and Moliseng, the tiny daughter Salamina must hide from the police; Elizabeth's grandparents, whose dusty farm in the Transvaal region becomes the scene of a horrific murder; a Dutch Reformed Church minister who is the very embodiment of judgmental condescension; and an array of black characters - Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa, male and female, old and young.

At times in the 61-page script, Tyler has to shift among multiple characters in a single scene, keeping each personality and transition clear. That isn't, she says, as hard as you might imagine.

"I got an idea about the people when I was in Africa, so I see them in my head," says Tyler, whose father and uncle spent some of their boyhood in Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia). "I feel very close to this, so it brings an ease into my mind and my heart... Pamela wrote a great story."

That thousands of teens will see the slender Tyler embody so many characters of different races, ethnicities, genders and ages is a great thing, says Dr. Robert Strickland, executive director of Miami-Dade Schools' Division of Life Skills.

OTHER GUY'S SHOES

"In our multicultural and diverse community, to see so many characters created by one actor in a story of courage and working through social injustice opens up a different way to see the world," Strickland says. "It suggests they can put themselves in someone else's shoes."

Gien, who had envisioned her play as a piece for multiple actors, was a little dumbfounded when Moss, her teacher and director, saw it as a solo show. She was hesitant about playing the black characters but says her hope is now that "we're coming into a time where we can rise above and transcend race, so we start not to notice it but we see the person."

And in a way, that's what she does through her many transformations in The Syringa Tree.

"A black woman who came to see the play in New York told me that seeing characters who were black, white, Jewish, Catholic, old and young living in one physical body told her the color of your skin isn't important," Gien says. "It's what in your heart that matters."

And now, performing The Syringa Tree in her reclaimed homeland, Gien's journey has come full circle in a way that amazes her.

"A man named Itumuleng, the director of an all-black theater festival, came to see the show with his friends. They were laughing with appreciation and astonishment, and I didn't know why," Gien says. 'Afterwards, he told me, 'We have never had a white person sing our songs so perfect.' He put his hand on his heart and said, 'This work which you have made gives us hope.'"

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.