In ‘Dark Noon,’ Hollywood Westerns Get a South African Reboot

The saloon is there. So are the dusty cowboy hats, the freshly laid railroad tracks and the Native American headdresses.

But while “Dark Noon” basks in these hallmarks of Hollywood westerns, it examines them through new eyes, leaving no triumphalist cliché unquestioned. Virtually every scene in this collaboration between a Danish director and a South African theater company (at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in previews before opening June 17) ends with at least one bullet-riddled corpse on the parched red earth of the set. Many of the dead are female or Indigenous.

“It is a western town,” Nhlanhla Mahlangu, the co-director and choreographer, said of the archetypal tumbleweedy community that rises up over the course of the action, “but it is all the settlement towns of South Africa as well. We are also talking about the shootings in our country.”

Nearly all of the play’s seven actors piled into an increasingly crammed green room with Mahlangu to discuss the work after their final performance at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., and they agreed about these similarities. “So much of our own lives are connected to these tropes,” said Mandla Gaduka, a cast member.

The narrative in which the white-hatted cowboy tames the Wild West, typically through the explicit or (usually) implicit genocide of his Indigenous predecessors, comes in for withering scrutiny in “Dark Noon.”