Actress Pamela Gien did not want to remember the sad times of her childhood in South Africa. She did not want to remember the injustices she saw or the tragedy that struck her family there.
But after being ignored for three decades, those memories rose sharply to the surface in a Los Angeles acting class exercise. Vibrant and malleable, they took shape first as improv, then as a written performance and finally as a play that has now traveled to New York and London and home again.
Gien's one-woman play, "The Syringa Tree," winner of off-Broadway's 2001 Obie Award for best play, makes its Los Angeles debut Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse. From her first appearance as a 6-year-old child on a swing, Gien (in some performances here) portrays 24 characters, young and old, black and white. Laughing, crying, singing and dancing, she is alternately her parents, their servants, Afrikaans preachers praying for rain, and whites and blacks torn apart by apartheid.
Offstage, she appears far more inhibited. Gien, 45, talks in a quiet, sometimes barely audible voice, seeming almost overwhelmed by her play's success. Now finishing a screenplay and a novel based on the play, the slight, elegant actress gets teary-eyed speaking of the night Oprah Winfrey came to a performance in New York, calls her play "the little engine that could" and notes that she is keeping a "gratitude journal."
Like her theatrical stand-in, Gien grew up in luxury in a Johannesburg suburb. One of her black nannies did actually give birth to a child at Gien's family home. Her physician father was indeed required to have separate consulting rooms for white and black patients -- each room with its own staircase and entry. And the central action in her play, the murder of her grandfather by a Rhodesian rebel, is true.
Also culled from memory are Gien's convent school visits to less fortunate schoolchildren, and her experiences as a university student at the time of the Soweto uprising of 1976. But Gien prefers not to differentiate fact from fiction. Her play is "semiautobiographical," she says. "It is a fictional story that's deeply invested with my feeling about my life."
When Gien first started on the play, Gien says, she used not only her own name but also exact names and places. "But I didn't feel relaxed about writing that way. I discovered when I changed certain things and allowed myself to write in a fictional way, I had much more freedom to be expressive and poetic. I had a much wider canvas."
