Theater review by Raven Snook
Thanks in part to old Hollywood westerns, the Wild West looms large in American self-mythology. It's exhilarating and disturbing to see its tall tales viciously dismantled from an outsider's perspective in Dark Noon, a fast and furious transhistorical one-act—written by Denmark’s Tue Biering, who also co-directed it with the Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist Nhlanhla Mahlangu—that St. Ann's Warehouse has imported from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Seven South African performers, playing European settlers, literally construct a pioneer town onstage, in the form of Johan Kølkjær's ingenious, easier-to-assemble-than-IKEA set. Their plans to push west, of course, rely on slaughtering Indigenous people to clear the land, enslaving Africans to work the fields and importing Chinese immigrants to build the railroads.
Dark Noon | Photograph: Courtesy Teddy Wolff
An inexhaustible cast of one white and six Black actors engages in a tongue-in-cheek minstrelsy, broadly portraying characters of all genders and backgrounds, like kids playing very bloody make-believe with whiteface, wigs and guns. They even enlist the audience to help: Be prepared to be preached to, sold at auction or hidden from gunslinging outlaws. Many sections of the text, especially the narration, are also shown via live video feed, both as a nod to the show’s send-up of classic movie tropes and as a way to see around the town’s new structures.
Dark Noon is outrageously entertaining, even if you cringe while you’re laughing; the stagecraft is spectacular and the slapstick is delightfully silly. But it is also an unsettling reminder of how the U.S. was built on a legacy of violence, and there is no fourth wall to protect you when the themes get deadly serious: The epilogue, in which the actors shed their characters to testify candidly about how the brutality of westerns affected their lives, is chilling. Freedom and democracy are Americans’ purported values, but barbarity may be our biggest export.
Dark Noon. St. Ann's Warehouse (Off Broadway). By Tue Biering. Directed by Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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Dark Noon | Photograph: Courtesy Teddy Wolff