ARTicles vol. 3 i.1b: Climbing the Syringa Tree

Former A.R.T. Company Member Pamela Gien returns home, to Cambridge and her native South Africa with her award-wining one-woman show, The Syringa Tree. After acclaimed runs in New York, London and across the nation, the play comes to the Boston area this winter as part of the A.R.T.’s South African Festival, after which it will travel to South Africa. “I think of A.R.T. as my home,” Ms. Gien says, “and I feel so lucky to be bringing something back.” Born in Johannesburg, Ms. Gien grew up during the height of apartheid. She completed an honors degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Dramatic Art and English. After studying at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris, she returned to South Africa and worked for a major theatre company there. A few years later, she and her husband left for America. Not long after her arrival here, she became a member of the A.R.T. acting company, appearing in fourteen productions in the course of three seasons. “It was the perfect creative home for me in America,” she says. “I learned so much from the people I worked with.” Currently she lives in Los Angeles, where she wrote The Syringa Tree. The play began as an exercise in an acting class taught by Larry Moss, who coached Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry) and Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) for their Academy Award-winning performances. The exercise was to turn to the person next to you and tell him or her a story from your life. “The event on my grandfather’s farm came into my mind – I have no idea why,” says Gien. “I hadn’t thought about it in all these years. And in that moment Larry said, ‘Don’t censor whatever it is that just came into your mind. Tell that story, it will choose you.'” Although largely fiction, the play is based on two true events from the author’s life. Ms. Gien’s grandfather was murdered on his farm when she was ten years old. The second event was the birth and subsequent concealment of her nanny’s child. Although there are twenty-four characters in the play, all of them played by Ms. Gien, The Syringa Tree is mostly told through the eyes of six-year-old Elizabeth. “It was never my intention to perform it alone. I wrote it as a story to be performed by other actors,” says Ms. Gien. The idea to do the play as a one-woman show came from its director, Larry Moss. “I thought he was completely insane. I thought he probably hadn’t really read it.” Of course, Mr. Moss had read it, and he believed that it would be possible for Ms. Gien to embody all the characters and tell the whole story alone. Ms. Gien now describes his vision as “perfect for the piece. If we are all equal, then the body doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who is bringing those characters to life. Every age, every race, every religion can live within one physical body.” This is not an easy task, even for the woman who wrote the piece. The twenty-four different characters come from all walks of life; they are black and white, young and old, male and female. “Apart from my actual grandfather, the characters are not based on any one person. Different aspects of different people inspired them.” Second, almost all the scenes involve more than one character so the performer has to change instantaneously from one to the next. The physical demands were such that Ms. Gien consulted a nutritionist to deal with the energy consumption of the show. “It’s physically demanding, mentally demanding, emotionally demanding. What more you could ask for as an actor? Literally, it’s like being on a tightrope for ninety minutes. It’s exhilarating.” The experience has certainly been worth the challenge, and the show’s success cannot be measured only by the many awards it has won, such as the OBIE Award for Best Play of 2001, the Drama Desk Award, the Drama League Award, and the Outer Critic’s Circle Award. “Being a white South African, it’s a privilege for me to play a black South African on stage. I had a black South African woman say to me that with The Syringa Tree I had honored her life and the road she’s walked. Her words meant so much to me.” She goes on to say that the play “has also toured in different cities with other actresses and that’s been very exciting, to see women of different races perform the play. I am proud that it holds up to that.” In addition to what the play has given Ms. Gien to work on as an actor, the experience helped her come to terms with her personal relationship to South Africa. “Subsequent to having written The Syringa Tree, I understand the anger, the fear and the upset surrounding my inability to express myself about it. I was really in grief about the place I came from and I didn’t know how to process it. When we began work on The Syringa Tree, it was a healing experience for me and has also been that for many, many people who have seen it.” The performer isn’t the only person getting a workout during The Syringa Tree. “The audience is an enormous part of the story. They are required to create the world in their own mind, as they would in a novel. They bring an enormous amount of themselves to what they are witnessing.” The Syringa Tree was Ms. Gien’s first foray into writing, but it is not her last. She has been working on the novel of The Syringa Tree and has just completed a screenplay called The Lily Field set here in Cambridge, which will also be produced by Matt Salinger. She looks forward to returning next year to begin shooting. Ms. Gien’s extraordinary talent as writer and performer are second only to her humility and gratitude for her role in The Syringa Tree. “You work very hard to make something and you feel artistically responsible for it. But in another way it does feel as though it’s a gift that comes into the world through you. I don’t like to speak in those terms but when you look at the gift other people say it has been to them and the gift that I know it has been to me, I feel profoundly thankful.” Amy Nora Long is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.