Gainesville’s community theater brought home the big awards this past weekend.
Actors’ Warehouse won major accolades both locally and regionally at the 2016 Southeastern Theatre Conference, where they were the only community theater representing Florida, and at the 2015 Florida Theatre Conference.
The group’s winning play, “Tshepang: The Third Testament,” pronounced “say-peng,” won Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Community Play at the 2016 SETC, and it won the same three awards, as well as Best Director, at the 2015 Florida Theatre Conference. The play was written by Lara Foot Newton, who gave permission to director Jan Cohen to perform the show in November. The play is set in South Africa and is based on a real-life incident of a rape of a small child that galvanized the country.
Cohen recruited her friends Mandisa Haarhoff and Steven H. Butler to become the leads in the play.
“The reason it’s doable to talk about that horrible subject matter is because it is done in the traditional African storyteller,” Cohen said. “The storyteller, if you will, is an innocent bystander.”
The innocent bystander is portrayed by Butler. One of the founding members of Actors’ Warehouse, he was reluctant at first to portray Simon.
“With any artist, no matter how much we think or how much talent we have, there is a little part of us that thinks, ‘Oh, I don’t think I can do this, or you know I’m in over my head,’” Butler said. “You know, we start to doubt ourselves. I think it’s something that is common in the creative process.”
For Haarhoff, the South African play hit close to home. The 29-year-old Fulbright scholar and doctoral candidate at UF is from Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
“I thought about my little sister living in South Africa, where these realities are not fiction,” she said. “I want to be able to be there for her, and I am not. I am here trying to get an education and make a better situation.”
Even though the story was set miles away from the U.S., it is a story that many people can relate to.
“I hope that they’re so aware, and that’s the power of theater, to make us aware that those things on stage are not so far at all, that they are closer than they think,” Haarhoff said.
