For many years, South Africa didn’t seem like a very funny place. Did you hear the one about apartheid? Who
wanted to? But even at the height of the Botha years, one man was laughing. The South African satirist and AIDS activist Pieter-Dirk Uys has been needling his government since the 1960s. More recently, he’s become an export, winning an Obie in 2004 and coming to Cambridge courtesy of American Repertory Theatre in 2005. He’s back through May 4 with a show titled
Elections & Erections (“the two things,” he says, “that were illegal during my life as a young South African growing up in apartheid Cape Town”). Uys appears not only as himself but as Desmond Tutu, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and his famed female alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, at
ART’S ZERO ARROW THEATRE, which has been transformed into a club with cabaret seating and a cash bar for the occasion.
ART’S ZERO ARROW THEATRE | Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge | 617.547.8300 | amrep.org