The Black Cockerel

We went to Out North Saturday night for their second world premiere of a play in two months. (The first was The Man in the Attic.) I'm not sure what constitutes an official world premiere. The first half was acted out. The second half the key actors had their scripts in front of them on music stands. While they knew the lines pretty well, they did peek down at and turned the pages.



Should we have different standards for a Nigerian playwright whose play is performed in Anchorage with local actors and a local director in a tiny playhouse, than we have for a Broadway play staged with well-known actors?

Maybe, but as I used to tell students when they complained my grading was too hard for a school like UAA, "Just because you're at UAA, doesn't mean you should be treated like second-rate students." And if these are serious theater folks, they need honest reactions.


And that said, I'm glad I went to see the play. I learned about African history, there was some riveting acting, some less than riveting acting, and I got to learn a bit of the process of developing a play.

But I don't want you to think the playwright is just some international student who landed in Fairbanks and writes plays to keep warm in the winter. The program notes tell us that playwright Ademola Bello

[I]n 2001...won both the Audience and Panelist Choice Awards at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, for his play, The Blackguard Prince. His other plays have had stage readings and workshop productions in New York at Actors Studio, Lark Play Development Center, and Frederick Loewe Room.

You can learn more about the playwright, who was in the audience Saturday night from the ADN article on him .


Basically the play is about Jonas Savimbi, rebel leader of Unitas in Angola and, for a while, CIA beneficiary, and his relationship with his foreign minister, Tito Chingunji,whose family, early on, are imprisoned. We also have a CIA agent named Jack Abramoff involved as well.


I think there is a lot of promise here. There were parts near the beginning where there was too much teaching of history in the dialogue which distracted from the drama. There needs to be a better way to get the necessary information across. While Earl Smith, who played Savimbi put life into his character - I'd say he nailed Savimbi except I've never even seen clips of Savimbi, but he certainly filled my stereotypes of a post colonial African tyrant - I didn't feel an ongoing chemistry among the three key actors. Darren Williams had probably the most difficult part. He played the foreign minister who wants to end the killing and find a way to peace, but who's forced to keep working for the rebel leader who intends to keep the civil war going until he becomes president. If he hopes to see his family alive, he has to do Savimbi's bidding. But how would someone keep this up for six years? And how does one carry out a role in which he bounces back and forth from confronting his tormenter to acting compliant? I have no idea. Williams gave it a good try, but it was an extremely hard role, and there was too much repetition of the same sort of cat and mouse games between Savimbi and Chingunji in the script.

But wow! What a way to fill in gaps about African history. To have Jonas Savimbi reincarnated live in Anchorage stirred much of the audience, I think, to go back and do a little homework. And the glimpse of Abramoff scamming African rebels before he took to scamming Americans more directly was also a revelation. And being face to face with a psychopath is always a daunting experience for anyone with a conscience.

We may live in Anchorage, but we get enough of these intimate first class theater experiences, to make it pretty exciting for me. I'd much rather watch something here at Out North or at Cyrano's than in the Performing Arts Center where I'm usually far from the stage at much higher prices. The last set of pictures is from the after play Q&A.


OK, here's a map of Africa from Africamap.com but you'll have to explore the map to find Angola for yourself. It was a Portuguese colony as was Mozambique.



This (first page of a) biographical obituary of Jonas Savimbi in the Review of African Political Economy is in sharp contrast to the NY Times report. The first emphasizes how he prolonged civil war until his death, causing the deaths and suffering of countless and highlights his glory days as the darling of the Reagan administration. The latter doesn't mention his CIA connections, let alone his Reagan days, and plays down the havoc his personal ambition caused until his death.


Finally, I've put off reading the ADN's review of the play until I finished writing this. Linda Billington gives a lot more information than I do, but in the end, we're fairly close in our assessments.