Malcolm Purkey

Perhaps one of the hallmarks of the postmodern age is our faith in memory as a guide and potential redeemer. In literature this inclination has inspired painful and important journeys back into the recent century's darkest hours. One of the more noted collectivist theater groups working in this mode is South Africa's Junction Avenue Theatre Company, whose celebrated dramas chronicle that nation's grim years under apartheid. Malcolm Purkey, one of the company's founding members, will be in residence on the Mount Holyoke campus the week of April 2. A dramatist/director, and professor and head of the school of dramatic art at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, he will give a talk on Junction Avenue and the anti-apartheid movement in Johannesburg Tuesday, April 3, at 7:30 pm in Hooker Auditorium. In addition, he will be visiting classes in the English and theater departments.

Purkey will also offer a two-part Five College graduate/faculty seminar on April 5 and April 12 at the University of Massachusetts. The seminar will be held in the office of Lee Edwards, dean of humanities and fine arts, on the second floor of South College, from 4 to 6 pm. (Participants are required to sign up in advance by emailing clingman@english.umass.edu or calling Ann Hopkins at 545-4169.) In addition, Purkey will direct a workshop for Five College students in the Rand Theater at UMass, April 11, from 1:30 to 4:30 pm.

Purkey's visit to Mount Holyoke, sponsored by the the dean of faculty's office and the English department, is owing to the efforts of Donald Weber, MHC professor and chair of the English department. Weber is teaching a literature seminar this semester on political imagination in contemporary South Africa. He first met and befriended Purkey during a trip to South Africa that the MHC professor organized for alumnae in October 1999. The group was particularly impressed by a Purkey lecture on the country's contemporary poetry and drama. “He's dynamic, he's creative, and he's been at the center of workshop theater in South Africa for the last thirty years,” says Weber.

Purkey, who is also a screenwriter, is considered the guiding spirit of Junction Avenue Theatre Company, one of South Africa's leading “workshop” companies. In the 1970s, Junction Avenue combined white and black theatre groups for collectivist “play-making,” and today produces consciousness-raising political dramas that have been performed on stages around the world. The company's productions typically mix traditions of indigenous theater and emphasize elements of music, language, and politics. Weber notes that the workshop's aesthetic is strongly influenced by the major twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht believed in the notion that theater should challenge and provoke its audience to confront their own role in society's missteps.

Weber's class is currently reading Junction Avenue's most notable play, Sophiatown, about a thriving black and white community in a suburb of Johannesburg that is taken over by the government, “renamed, displaced, and replaced.” The play portrays the town's effort, in the 1950s, to recover its vibrant multicultural world. “It's a play about recovering lost or repressed history,” says Weber, whose seminar is examining, through novels, plays, and poetry, the role of memory in society. He asks his students to consider “how the recovery of lost or forgotten history ignites political awareness.” Weber's class will also read Junction Avenue's 1999 play Love, Crime, and Johannesburg, inspired in part by recent events in South Africa, as well as by Brecht's charismatic gangster-hero, Mac the Knife, from his classic Threepenny Opera.

Other works created by Junction Avenue under Purkey's direction include The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, Randlords and Rotgut, and Tooth and Nail. Purkey has received numerous honors for his work, including a Breytenbach Epathlon, an English Academy award, and multiple Vita awards. He has been a Fulbright scholar in the United States, the recipient of a French Academic Fellowship, and a British Council Fellow. In addition to his work with Junction Avenue, Purkey has worked as a screenwriting consultant for MNET Television's New Directions and developed a screenplay adaptation for the French TV company Le Sabre. He has written a number of screenplays and television dramas, and was a finalist in the Channel Four short film competition with The Bicycle Rider.

Weber expresses gratitude to Donal O'Shea, dean of faculty, for making Purkey's visit possible. “To have someone of Purkey's accomplishments come here is a truly great event,” he says.