MULEKWA

Playwright Charles Mulekwa was 17 when Ugandan troops loyal to former dictator Idi Amin burst into his home and jammed a rifle in the face of his uncle, whom they suspected of being a rebel. Mulekwa pleaded with the gunman not to shoot, and without thinking, leaped between his uncle and the barrel of the gun.

The gunman reasoned the boy was not likely to risk his own life for a rebel soldier and took Mulekwa at his word that the man was in fact his uncle.

It was a tense moment, even for a nation that in its 45 years of independence has known only a decade of peace. Just walking the streets of Uganda was at one point a dangerous proposition.

Mulekwa drew upon the incident with his uncle for his 1999 play A Time of Fire, which opens tonight at Providence Black Repertory Company. Fire is Mulekwa’s first attempt at writing for a public outside Uganda. It’s a play about war: about three characters who flee the fighting and hide in a cave only to discover they have brought the war with them.

Mulekwa, 42, is based in Rhode Island now, as he completes a doctorate’s degree in theater performance at Brown University. The other day, he sat down at Black Rep to talk about his work.

Mulekwa, a slight, soft-spoken man, said that he once wrote social-situation plays, boy-meets-girl stories with a vernacular spin that would be meaningful only to Ugandans. But in the 1990s he wanted to touch upon more universal themes, and decided to tackle the issue of war, African war, any war.

“My early plays were about telling really good stories,” said Mulekwa. “They had no agenda. A Time of Fire has an agenda, how we talk to the rest of the world versus the Ugandan people.”

A Time of Fire, which takes its name from a line in the August Wilson play The Piano Lesson, started as a 15-character play and was gradually pared down to three characters: a soldier, a student and a thief. There are no women the play, said Mulekwa, because he didn’t know how to write about them without them being raped on stage.

So he sticks to dialogue, some of it episodic and a little hard to penetrate, about fighting and the cruelties of war.

In conversation at the end of the play, Omo, the student asks Ssasi the thief not to speak ill of the Stone Age people who left their art behind on the cave walls.

“Those people knew how to live together,” said Omo. “Make a good fire and share the warmth. Use it to keep away trouble from animals. We use it to burn innocent children and villages.

“These drawings you see were not a game. They were for studying the animals. These people got together and protected one another. We get together and kill each other. Tell me which is primitive?”

Most of his life Mulekwa, who said his grandmother would not let him serve in the army, has known war, known times when you had to dodge bullets on the street. That incident with his uncle and the soldiers left a deep impression. After the soldiers let his uncle alone, they demanded money and wanted to abduct his aunt. Again Mulekwa pleaded with the troops, saying his aunt just gave birth a couple of weeks ago.

They then wanted to see the baby. If there were none, they said they would shoot Mulekwa in the legs. The baby was produced.

So the troops took just the money. But as they were leaving, the soldier carrying the cash turned and gave some back. This is for milk for the baby, he said.

Mulekwa was struck by the human side of this man who could be so menacing yet care for a child he didn’t know.

“Soldiers every now and then take a break, and they will come over and talk to you and show you their human side. I was very interested in how they became soldiers, if it was by accident or if some girl he loved was stolen away by a captain and he joined the army to get even with him.”

The character of the thief in the play, Ssasi, was inspired by a looter who one day walked past Mulekwa’s house with an open gash in his head, the result of glass shattering as he tired to break into a shop. Mulekwa wanted to find out as much as he could about the man and learned that he had bled to death.

As for the student in the play, Omo, he is based to some extent on Mulekwa.

A Time of Fire has been produced in Uganda, but it is not taught there in schools. Mulekwa, a consultant for the film The Last King of Scotland (he made sure Africans in the picture were faithfully represented) doesn’t know whether the government is opposed to the script or whether schools are engaging in a form of self-censorship that is prevalent in Uganda. Playwrights, said Mulekwa, are often “spoken to” about their work, and that is enough to keep a work from being produced. Then again, it may just be that the play is tough to take.

“In A Time of Fire the audience is required to think,” said Mulekwa, “and back home audiences don’t want to think. Life is hard enough. When people come to the theater they want to relax.”

Mulekwa, who goes back to Uganda every summer, has been living in the United States since 2003. He actually visited America during the previous year and got to see some of the country. When he received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation to attend school where ever he wanted, Mulekwa said he was familiar with Europe and thought he could learn a lot from going to school here. That has turned out to be the case. He said he has learned a lot more about Africa than he could if he were living there, books on the subject are so plentiful here.

“It’s more open here,” said Mulekwa. “America will study anything, no matter how uncomfortable.”

A Time of Fire opens tonight and runs through March 8 at Providence Black Repertory Company, 276 Westminster St. Tickets are $20, $10 for students and seniors. Call (401) 351-0353, ext 104.

cgray@projo.com