Fringe, Reviewed: We are Proud to Present...

[ theater ]

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, by University of the Arts 

Attended: Sat., Sept. 6, 2 p.m., Arts Bank at The University of the Arts; closes Sat. Sept. 13

Six time Barrymore Award nominee and F. Otto Haas Award recipient Matt Pfeiffer returns to the Brind School to direct We Are Proud to Present.

 WE THINK:

We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 is the kind of play that, when it ends, you don’t really want to clap for – but only because you feel like you’ve been “emotionally punched and kicked,” as my date put it.

This show’s shortened title, We Are Proud to Present, and its bloated FringeArts description tell nothing of the rawness and timeliness of the show. We Are Proud to Present is a meta-tale: We’re told the story of the German control of Southwest Africa by a group of young actors who improv their way through their own understanding, or rather, misunderstanding, of the 20^th century’s first holocaust. Six characters (three black, three white and named as such in the play) examine their own limited understanding of the time as well as, to various degrees of success, what it means for their own identities and interpersonal interactions.

“White Man” wants to tell the story through the lens of the Germans’ letters home, because they’re the only “tangible” “proof” they have, the only non-Wikipedia’d version of the story at hand. “Black Man” points out that that version completely ignores the suffering of the Herero people.

White guilt is explored. White Man says that he doesn’t feel comfortable in his prescribed role as a murderer, to which Black Man retorts that he wasn’t the one getting murdered in the scene. The parallel drawn here between the enacted cold-blooded shooting of a Herero man by a German officer for breaking an arbitrary law and the recent death of Michael Brown in Ferguson is striking and perfect.

Through the course of an explosive and horrendously failed improv sketch (in the context of the play’s play), the characters come to realize, while simultaneously teaching the audience, that it’s impossible to truly understand another person’s experience, and that through retelling history, we all bastardize it in some way unseen until the damage is irreparable.