Brave new world
Mooi Street Moves looks for signs of the future in Johannesburg after apartheid.

By Robert Avila

THEATREFIRST RECENTLY LOST its home at the Oakland YWCA, but its itinerant status hasn't prevented the company from starting its new season on the right foot. With renowned South African playwright Paul Slabolepszy's Mooi Street Moves, a one-act post-apartheid duet, artistic director Clive Chafer introduces Bay Area audiences to another well-wrought drama from the greater English-speaking world.

This contemporary urban tale, engagingly presented and buoyed by an understated humor, takes place in a once affluent and segregated district of Johannesburg now transformed by the fall of apartheid into an inner-city hodgepodge marked by poverty and crime. Henry Stone (Joseph Foss), a naive white bumpkin, has returned after six years to his brother's apartment only to find it occupied by Stix Letsebe (David Skillman), a streetwise black man with a roomful of stolen goods. Arriving alone in the world and penniless, having been taken in by a grifter, the terrified Henry responds only gradually to Stix's gestures of hospitality amid the city's new social calculus. Stix finally convinces him to stay until they locate his brother, meanwhile pulling Henry into the trade and teaching him the rules of life on the lively Mooi Street, where "middlemen" like Stix hock their wares.

The play has its melodramatic and sentimental side, but Skillman and Foss fix our attention immediately and hold it to the end. Chafer gets the most from their complex relationship, which manifests itself beautifully in the continual jockeying for position, as well as the boyish clowning and tussling that go on between them. The actors also convincingly render the two befuddling accents and dialects that underscore the cultural chasm between Stix and Henry. At the same time, they do a superb job of making us believe how readily their mutual longing for friendship and aid not only bridges that divide but also brings them in a brotherly bond as authentic and necessary to each as the one that originally drew Henry to Johannesburg.

Anyone who has seen a play in the elegantly molded space at the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club, where TheatreFIRST has taken up temporary residence, will have to admit what a fine job set designer Christina La Sala has does in turning it into a shabby, low-budge "Joburg" apartment. Bordered on one side by a rumpled bed and on the other by a wall-sized stack of boxed appliances, Stix's modest digs betray a frighteningly authentic species of male housekeeping. Together with Dale Altvater's moody lighting and Greg Scharpen's discreet sound design, it all serves wonderfully to focus an already intimate stage on two magnetic performances.

Meat is murder

On the processing line of a Kentucky slaughterhouse, three workers – Maggot (Ellen Scarpaci), Roach (Mollena Williams), and Brandon (John Atwood) – jab and cut away in unison at a steady stream of carcasses. The routine, as a stage pantomime, vaguely suggests the stylized vocabulary of modern dance. But this would be the crippling choreography of industrial capitalism we're watching, inspired by nothing deeper than profit. And if the characters submit their bodies to the punishing terms of the job, they pass the time talking in their own playful, salacious way: language is a weapon at their side sharper than any blade. In such daily drudgery – where a worker has more in common with the cow than with management – it's a whole other dance that unfolds.

There's a nice precision to Naomi Wallace's choice of setting for Slaughter City: the killing floor of economic necessity and greed. And her somewhat diffuse but darkly lyrical, passionately revolutionary play receives a timely and intelligent treatment from Crowded Fire Theater Company in this West Coast premiere. Coincidentally (or is something in the air?), Bertolt Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards, an amusing and still rousing piece of "epic theater" set in the Chicago meatpacking industry, runs through April 25 in a production by Custom Made Theater Company at Venue 9. Taking her cue from Brecht, Wallace – the gifted Kentucky-born playwright whose One Flea Spare was staged by Crowded Fire in 2000 – summons a potent metaphor to her brand of political theater.

Mixing realism and fantasy with muscular, poetical dialogue, Wallace's workers do their shaky best to stick together under the hazards and indignities leveled at them by their sadistic, union-busting boss, Mr. Baquin – an Ionesco-like burlesque of the maniacal company executive, played with smooth precision by Paul Lancour. They turn menacingly on newcomer Cod (Gillian Chadsey), a scab hired during their local's recent, unsuccessful strike. But the mysterious Cod (whom we first see looking on at a scene from the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911) is actually in the employ of an even stranger fellow, the Sausage Man (Alan Quismorio), a sort of Mephistopheles of meat, or perhaps the spirit of capitalism incarnate, who uses the time-tripping Cod to stir up trouble among the working classes in various historical confrontations as if he were Sausage Man's dynamic and necessary counterpart in the capitalist zeitgeist.

The play's two acts are broken into a series of short, sometimes didactic scenes smothered by an atmosphere heavy with sex and death. With often arresting dialogue and borderline-absurdist humor, they traverse a deeply psychological terrain of pent-up desires and blurred racial, sexual, and class boundaries, all against the shadowy backdrop of U.S. labor history. If this complexity in focus and tone tends to diminish the overarching coherence and revolutionary élan of the play, it improves on the straightforward Marxist line in Saint Joan by staying attuned to messy and overlapping categories of social allegiance and power. With solid working-class sympathies but a sly glance at all forms of coercive authority, Wallace's sexually charged and psycho-political landscape moves away from the masses and toward the body itself – subjected to competing claims of ownership – as the ultimate site of political struggle and liberation.

'Mooi Street Moves' runs through May 2. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m., Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk. $18-$22. (510) 436-5085, www.theatrefirst.com. 'Slaughter City' runs through May 8. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, S.F. $15-$20. (415) 675-5995, www.crowdedfire.org.