Live at BAM: “A Human Being Died That Night”

June 10, 2015 By Benjamin Preston Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Matthew Marsh (De Kock) and Noma Dumezweni (Pumla). Photos by Richard Termine, courtesy of BAM

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You don’t have to watch or read much news to ascertain that America’s unresolved racial problems have bubbled back to the surface of our collective social consciousness over the past year or so. Sure, America is no apartheid South Africa, but, as was the case there, everyone in this country has a different opinion about who are the aggressors and who are the victims in a seemingly endless struggle. The “us and them” factor is certainly at play.

“A Human Being Died That Night” — a three-actor play based upon Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s interviews with Eugene De Kock, a former policeman who committed murder at the behest of apartheid South Africa’s security apparatus — is now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). On Tuesday evening, a panel discussion took place after the show.

The play, staged entirely in De Kock’s cell at a maximum security prison in Pretoria, is a somber examination of right, wrong, the gray areas between and the potential for reconciliation that exists when atrocities have been committed.

Nicholas Wright’s stage adaptation of Pumla’s book is gripping, and early on in the play, Matthew Marsh (De Kock) invites Noma Dumezweni (Pumla) to get “in the dirt” with De Kock as Pumla tries to understand his rationale for carrying out acts of murder and torture. The audience follows the pair on this bizarre journey into a killer’s moral architecture.

At some points, it’s a pure psychological thriller as Pumla, having her own regrets about past thoughts and actions, coaxes the killer into revealing parts of his complex inner world. Only, the inner world of De Kock the audience sees is, like most people’s — plugged into the society of which he is a part.

If you’re looking for an evil man at which you can gloat, you will not find that character in Wright’s play. Pumla emulates a wary sense of empathy as she digs deeper into the past of a man who is very clearly scarred by his actions, and by the state officials who tasked him with carrying them out.

Stripped of his power, we’re left with a man who says he accepts responsibility for his actions and is repentant. Does that excuse his crimes? No, but as Pumla says in the play, “Eugene was no longer radically other than me; he was a human being.”

The panel after the play, part of a series of discussions BAM has planned called “BAM Gatherings,” kicked off the conversation with a discussion about empathy.

“We’re not as different as we like to believe,” observed Trisha Stevens, a clinical social worker and one of the panelists. “Under certain circumstances, we might not act in a way we thought we would have.”

A South African man in the audience who said he had been part the African National Congress said the play’s particulars were very accurate. He remembered the very real terror brought about by the possibility of covert police attacks like the ones De Kock talks about in the play.

“But the capacity of human beings to be evil contrasts with the capacity to forgive,” he said.

Wright, a native South African, wrote earlier this year that he was attracted to Pumla’s book because “its insights apply not only to South Africa, but to any society that has gone through the trauma of repressive violence.”

The insights, he said, were that although such a society should not excuse past violence, it should seek to understand its causes. The second, and perhaps most important insight he found was that in order for society to move forward from such a history, perpetrators must repent and reach some level of reconciliation with their victims.

Although it has been many years since terror squads like the Jim Crow-era Ku Klux Klan have operated with impunity in America, the scars from that time may yet remain. As one audience member wondered aloud in the post-show discussion, what if white police officers — often in the media spotlight for victimizing racial minorities — are merely the scapegoats for an inherently racist society?

“A Human Being Died That Night” will be shown through June 21 at BAM.