South Africa Mirrors the American West in “Dark Noon”

Staff writer —a pretty brick industrial warehouse conversion in the Dumbo neighborhood—can show you Brooklyn at its most romantic: first, you’ll see sunshine slanting onto cobblestone streets, then Brooklyn Bridge Park’s soft paths, then the East River, with Lower Manhattan shimmering beyond. Inside the theatre, though, you’ll find the country at her blood-soaked worst. A shock of the awful is the key to the horror-movie-style excitement of a brutally clownish retelling of European settlers’ push into the American West which St.

Ann’s artistic director, Susan Feldman, first saw at the Edinburgh Fringe. A troupe of seven South African actors, many wearing slapped-on whiteface and yellow mop wigs, exhort the audience via live video and carnival-barker shouting—don’t sit in front unless you want to be hustled into service—as the decades (Slavery! Civil War! Gold rush!) zoom past. It’s not all history, though, and the supposedly American aspect also shifts, at times, into South African self-portraiture.

“Dark Noon” is the work of the Danish writer-director Tue Biering, in collaboration with both the South African cast and the co-director, Nhlanhla Mahlangu. Mahlangu has said that the show’s town—a take on Western movie sets, built, as we watch, with folding frames and a working railway—also recalls the apartheid-era squatter camps of home. The two countries rhyme, of course, in other ways, too.

At one point, each actor addresses a camera, confessio.