AIDS inhibitor Pieter-Dirk Uys is a clown on a crusade BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Foreign Aids Written and performed by Pieter-Dirk Uys. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre in association with the Market Theatre at Zero Arrow Theatre through January 23.

South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys did not sit back and put his feet up after 20 years of serving as a thorn in the lily-white side of apartheid. Instead, the 59-year-old crusader clown turned from what he deems one lethal "virus" to another, taking on the AIDS pandemic that threatens to kill more South Africans than the nation’s dictatorial apartheid regime, out of business 10 years now, ever did. In his one-man performance piece Foreign Aids, which won a 2004 Obie and is now introducing Uys to Cambridge audiences, he gingerly places one foot on American soil to get in a few digs but keeps the other solidly planted in the AIDS education mission he embarked on four years ago, taking his frank, funny, graphically informative advocacy of safe sex into South African schools of every sort. Indeed, the piece ends on a note of triumph when Uys encounters an 18-year-old man in a mall who remembers the entertainer’s comical, condom-pushing evangelism. Asked how he is, the youth replies exultantly, "I’m still alive!"

Whatever his intent, Uys on stage is a far cry from the surgeon-general. He enters in the guise of his alter ego, glittering Afrikaner matron Evita Bezuidenhout, self-described "most famous white woman in South Africa" and a sort of Dame Edna Everage with political chops. Like the Divine Mrs. E., whom Australians and Brits believe in so wholeheartedly that actor Barry Humphries’s biography of his creation has sometimes been found on non-fiction shelves, Mrs. Bezuidenhout is a substantive enough entity to have addressed South Africa’s Parliament and interviewed Nelson Mandela on TV. Making her debut in snowy Cambridge, she purred that she felt at home because "everything outside is so white." She apologized for apartheid, silkily expressing her regret that "it didn’t work." And by mouthing her support for the present South African government and its blind eye toward HIV/AIDS, she delivered Uys’s first skewer to the ribs of current president Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s handpicked successor, who has angered Uys by refusing to acknowledge or address the pandemic.

Indeed, some have criticized Foreign Aids for being too serious. In the words of Calvin Trillin, who profiled Uys for the New Yorker last May, "there are those in South Africa, some of them longstanding fans of Pieter-Dirk Uys, who believe that with Foreign Aids he has allowed himself to forget the sacred recipe governing the balance of tickles and punches necessary for an entertainer to hold his audience." It’s true that Uys’s righteous anger over the AIDS crisis makes this outing more urgent than silly. He does not seem to be kidding when he remarks that "once upon a time, not so long ago, we had an apartheid regime in South Africa that killed people. Now we have a democratic government that just lets them die." And in a chilling (if not technically impressive) ventriloquist routine in which ex-president and apartheid iron fist P.W. Botha manipulates a Charlie McCarthy–esque Mbeki, Uys goes so far as to suggest that the government’s failure to curb the pandemic might be a deliberate attempt to — as Scrooge would say — decrease the surplus population.

This is not to say that Uys, a mischievous mimic and delighter in drag, is all punch and no punch line. Identifying laughter as a great dismantler of fear, he lampoons a finger-waggling, pooched-lipped Botha, who sounds eerily like the terror-invoking Bush-ites and considers democracy "too good to share with just anyone." Uys even sends up his idols, Desmond Tutu (a woolly-wigged man in a "purple dress" sporting more jewelry than Mrs. Bezuidenhout) and Mandela, who "came out of his dark cloud to share with us its silver lining, along with some of the most hideous ethnic shirts ever made." He also imparts the confidences of Evita Bezuidenhout’s estranged younger sister, Bambi Kellermann, the glam widow of a fugitive Nazi who abused her, she throatily tells us, for refusing to give him a blow job. Tossing her platinum curls, crossing her gold-spiked-heeled legs, and taking a bit of ash from the bum’s urn on her long red fingernail, she proceeds to do so.

Inaugurating the American Repertory Theatre’s new 300-seat black-box theater at Zero Arrow Street on a simple raised stage strewn with the plastic-bagged detritus of his various personae, Uys is a man of low production values. He developed the habit, he told the Phoenix, of changing costumes on stage back in the days of apartheid, when he feared he’d be arrested if he left the stage to apply his nails or his eyelashes. (Perhaps because he’s a white Afrikaner whom some in power regarded as a jester, Uys was never jailed.) Given the current democracy he clearly cherishes, Uys probably has to dodge fewer bullets these days. But brandishing a fierce sincerity and a fistful of condoms, when it comes to HIV/AIDS, he’s still shooting.