THE STYRINGA TREE
by Pamela Gien
27 Jan - 6 March 2004
The Syringa Tree is a powerful one-woman performance spanning more than four decades and four generations from the 1960s to present-day free South Africa. Told initially through Lizzie’s eyes, as a child born into a household shared by two families—one white, one black—the story moves from the seemingly secure world of a six-year-old girl and expands to include the different perspectives and recollections of her parents and the home’s black servants, all of whom seem to comprise a single, large family.
It becomes clear soon enough, though, that the warmly maternal maid Salamina bears a terrible burden her employers do not share and perhaps cannot even imagine. Salamina lives in constant fear that the roving South African security police will tear her away from her own young daughter, Moliseng, who lacks official identity papers to remain with her mother. Salamina’s anxiety mounts each time the little girl wanders out into the yard or is spotted by a stranger.
Lizzie’s own awareness and confusion multiply when little Moliseng is suddenly ripped away from the household and swirled into a bureaucratic void. The brutal murder of Lizzie’s grandfather further traumatizes both families, who must in their own ways come to grips with the consequences of a society of legislated and ruthlessly enforced racial separation.
Lizzie’s South Africa is a place of simple grandeur and hidden dangers. While her memories celebrate the chirping of crickets or berries from the syringa tree, they also reveal a country where crocodiles lurk in bushes, babies wilt with dehydration, and people murder in cold blood. The Syringa Tree is, by turns, a celebration of a childhood in a near-paradise, a requiem to apartheid’s victims, and an indictment of the racial policy’s perpetrators and silent enablers.
Like her young protagonist, playwright Pamela Gien grew up a privileged, precocious child on a pretty estate with a contingent of black servants. She lived in constant fear that her father, a physician who didn’t kowtow to apartheid policy, would be taken away by the authorities. From her bedroom window at night, she watched the police accosting and beating blacks who failed to present the required identity papers. When she was 10, a Rhodesian rebel fatally stabbed her grandfather. The killer was never caught; Gien and her family never returned to their farm. Gien wrote and originally performed The Syringa Tree herself, receiving the 2001 Obie Award for Best Play Off-Broadway.
It becomes clear soon enough, though, that the warmly maternal maid Salamina bears a terrible burden her employers do not share and perhaps cannot even imagine. Salamina lives in constant fear that the roving South African security police will tear her away from her own young daughter, Moliseng, who lacks official identity papers to remain with her mother. Salamina’s anxiety mounts each time the little girl wanders out into the yard or is spotted by a stranger.
Lizzie’s own awareness and confusion multiply when little Moliseng is suddenly ripped away from the household and swirled into a bureaucratic void. The brutal murder of Lizzie’s grandfather further traumatizes both families, who must in their own ways come to grips with the consequences of a society of legislated and ruthlessly enforced racial separation.
Lizzie’s South Africa is a place of simple grandeur and hidden dangers. While her memories celebrate the chirping of crickets or berries from the syringa tree, they also reveal a country where crocodiles lurk in bushes, babies wilt with dehydration, and people murder in cold blood. The Syringa Tree is, by turns, a celebration of a childhood in a near-paradise, a requiem to apartheid’s victims, and an indictment of the racial policy’s perpetrators and silent enablers.
Like her young protagonist, playwright Pamela Gien grew up a privileged, precocious child on a pretty estate with a contingent of black servants. She lived in constant fear that her father, a physician who didn’t kowtow to apartheid policy, would be taken away by the authorities. From her bedroom window at night, she watched the police accosting and beating blacks who failed to present the required identity papers. When she was 10, a Rhodesian rebel fatally stabbed her grandfather. The killer was never caught; Gien and her family never returned to their farm. Gien wrote and originally performed The Syringa Tree herself, receiving the 2001 Obie Award for Best Play Off-Broadway.
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