In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Between the Rainbow Nation and the Melting Pot:Troubling Reconciliation with The Fall
• Jared Strange (bio)

Introduction: A New Turn Toward South Africa?

She stands atop the table, extending a hand as if pushing her way through the living tableau. "I heard Eric Garner across the Atlantic," she says, reaching from Cape Town in the world of her play to a killing caught on the streets of New York City.¹ The invocation, one of many in her paean to countless Black lives lost to systemic violence, is especially poignant from where the audience sits: not in Cape Town, but in Washington, DC's Studio Theatre, just a few hours' drive from the Big Apple. It is a Saturday night in October of 2018 and I am watching The Fall, a play co-created and performed by a group of young South African actors who, like the college students they portray, were involved with the #RhodesMustFall movement that began at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The movement, led by Black and Coloured² students, challenged institutionalized racism at the university and spawned other "Fallist" initiatives targeting everything from exorbitant tuition fees to xenophobia.³ Though its ambitions grew national in scale, its most iconic moment was the removal of Cecil Rhodes, the (in)famous imperialist once memorialized in stone on the UCT campus.

Beyond the overt reference to Garner, the parallels between the reincarnated Cape Town of The Fall and the present-day United States are manifold: mass demonstrations against anti-Black violence have grown in prominence over the past seven years; American universities have been sites of contest over Eurocentric curricula and racist historical [End Page 59] markers; and Rhodes finds plenty of company among the Confederate leaders whose memorials have been publicly removed from their plinths. These commonalities were explicitly identified in the marketing and dramaturgical materials published by Studio Theatre and in reviews from major DC outlets, including that of The Washington Post's Peter Marks, who invoked both the American civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter in his writeup.⁴ Similar notes had already been made in reviews during The Fall's previous stops in New York and even London.⁵ That The Fall would resonate with American struggles for racial justice appears to have been obvious. In fact, with the resurgent protests against police brutality and anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020, its resonance only seemed to grow, a development the South African State Theatre responded to by making a recording of the production available for free via YouTube.⁶

The idea that a South African play like the The Fall would resonate with American audiences is well founded. When it comes to matters of race, the two nations appear to share a unique bond forged by cultural exchange, political affiliations, and a perceived mutual intelligibility based on similar histories of racial segregation. Yet despite the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the fall of Apartheid, and the hope of "post-racial" peace and prosperity that greeted the rise of Nelson Mandela and later Barack Obama, challenges to ongoing racial violence and inequity in both countries have shifted the discourse away from the achievements of the past and toward unfinished business in the present. In the years prior to the arrival of The Fall, my own mid-Atlantic region saw South African drama conspicuously programmed into several theatre seasons, often with the express purpose of inspiring conversations related to systemic racism. This included Washington DC's Mosaic Theatre, which ran Athol Fugard's Blood Knot and Nicholas Wright's adaptation of A Human Being Died That Night in repertory (2017), and EgoPo Classic Theatre in Philadelphia, which also presented A Human Being Died That Night as part of an all-South African season alongside works by Fugard, Reza de Wet, Matsemela Maaka, and a visiting production by South African company Abrahmse and Meyer (2018–19). Unsurprisingly, Fugard, South Africa's most internationally renowned playwright, remains a staple across the country. Recent productions of his work at Signature [End Page 60] Theatre in New York, including his MASTER HAROLD…and the boys (2016) and Boesman and Lena (2019), have used...

中文翻译：

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在彩虹国度和熔炉之间：与堕落的令人不安的和解

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 在彩虹国度和熔炉之间：与堕落的令人不安的和解
• 贾里德·斯特兰奇（生物）

简介：走向南非的新转折？

她站在桌子顶上，伸出一只手，好像在推动她穿过生动的画面。“我听到埃里克·加纳 (Eric Garner) 横跨大西洋的声音，”她说，从她的戏剧世界中的开普敦到在纽约市街头被捕的杀戮。¹在她对无数因系统性暴力而丧生的黑人生命的赞歌中，这首歌是其中之一，从观众所在的地方尤其令人心酸：不是在开普敦，而是在华盛顿特区的工作室剧院，距离大剧院只有几个小时的车程。苹果。那是 2018 年 10 月的一个星期六晚上，我正在看The Fall，一部由一群南非年轻演员共同创作和表演的戏剧，他们与他们描绘的大学生一样，参与了始于开普敦大学 (UCT) 的#RhodesMustFall 运动。这场由黑人和有色人种²学生领导的运动挑战了大学里制度化的种族主义，并催生了其他“堕落”倡议，目标是从高昂的学费到仇外心理。³尽管它的雄心壮志在全国范围内扩大了规模，但其最具标志性的时刻是塞西尔·罗德 (Cecil Rhodes) 的撤职，这位（臭名昭著的）帝国主义者曾在 UCT 校园内被石刻纪念。

除了明显的参考加纳，之间的相似之处转世的开普敦秋季和当今美国是多方面的：对反黑暴力突出，在过去7年中发展大规模示威; 美国大学一直是争论欧洲中心课程和种族主义历史[End Page 59]标记的场所；罗德斯在同盟国领导人中找到了很多同伴，他们的纪念碑已被公开从他们的基座上移走。这些共同点在 Studio Theatre 出版的营销和戏剧材料以及主要 DC 媒体（包括华盛顿邮报）的评论中明确指出的彼得马克斯，他在他的文章中援引了美国民权运动和黑人的命也是命。⁴在The Fall之前在纽约甚至伦敦的停留期间，评论中已经做出了类似的说明。⁵这秋季将与种族公正美国斗争的共鸣似乎是显而易见的。事实上，随着 2020 年夏天反对警察暴行和反黑人暴力的抗议活动重新抬头，它的共鸣似乎只会增长，南非国家剧院通过在 YouTube 上免费提供制作录音来回应这一发展。⁶

像《秋天》这样的南非戏剧会引起美国观众共鸣的想法是有充分根据的。在种族问题上，两国似乎有着独特的纽带，这些纽带是由文化交流、政治派别以及基于相似种族隔离历史的相互理解而形成的。然而，尽管民权运动取得来之不易的胜利，种族隔离制度的垮台，以及迎接纳尔逊曼德拉和后来的巴拉克奥巴马崛起的“后种族”和平与繁荣的希望，但对持续的种族暴力和不平等的挑战两国都将话题从过去的成就转移到了当前未完成的事业上。在秋天到来之前的几年里，我自己的大西洋中部地区看到南非戏剧明显地被编入了几个戏剧季，通常以激发与系统性种族主义相关的对话为明确目的。这包括华盛顿特区的马赛克剧院，该剧院播放了 Athol Fugard 的Blood Knot和 Nicholas Wright 改编的A Human Being That Night in Repertory (2017)，以及费城的 EgoPo Classic 剧院，该剧院还演出了A Human Being That Night作为整个南非季节的一部分，Fugard、Reza de Wet、Matsemela Maaka 的作品以及南非公司 Abrahmse 和 Meyer（2018-19 年）的访问作品。不出所料，南非最著名的剧作家富加德仍然是该国的主角。他最近在纽约Signature [End Page 60] Theatre 的作品，包括他的MASTER HAROLD……and the boys (2016) 和Boesman and Lena (2019)，都使用了……