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Down the Niger River to Timbuktu
Actor Tanya Shaffer proves travel and career can go hand in hand
by Michelle Goldberg
      

Excerpts:

     It’s easy to idealize a nomadic, bohemian life when you’ve got nothing to lose. It’s quite another thing to choose that path over the comforting clutches of a remunerative career, a stable community and a secure understanding of how your life will likely unfold. Meet Tanya Shaffer. An accomplished actor and travel writer, she’s getting ready to tour her latest performance piece, a one-woman show inspired by her travels through Africa, and she’s finishing a book on the same subject. The show, Let My Enemy Live Long, is hilarious, thrilling, ironic and compassionate all at once. It also manages to be political without ever being pedantic. After generating rapturous reviews, the piece was moved from a small, underground theater in San Francisco to a bigger downtown space, where the run was extended by popular demand.

     “I remember thinking when I started the trip to Africa that I’d made a narrow escape from a normal life,” says Shaffer. She puts it a bit more bluntly at the beginning of Let My Enemy Live Long: “I figure it’s my life,” she says, “and if I want to run from it, I can.”  . . .

. . .

. . .  I’ll admit, going into Let My Enemy Live Long I was dreading the dreary boredom that often accompanies a dose of earnest progressive culture. But while Shaffer’s piece may be good for you, it tastes great too. It’s intellectually stimulating and politically provocative, but it’s also riveting entertainment, tackling issues of racism, religion and a search for meaning with exuberant humor and deep respect for human contradictions. At one point in the show Shaffer muses, “Is there such a thing as a pure, personal connection at any time, in any place, let alone between one with shoes and one without?” It’s a profound question, one that lends a richness and universality to the whole piece. I walked out of Let My Enemy Live Long in that sublime daze that lingers after a truly engrossing performance, feeling not just enlightened but lightened, too.

     As Let My Enemy Live Long begins, Shaffer is squeezing her way onto a boat that is to take her up the Niger River to the mythical city-turned-tourist-trap Timbuktu. Immediately, she is befriended by Torre, a buffoonish but good-hearted would-be shoe salesman who introduces Tanya to some of the more unsavory aspects of African racial politics . . .

 


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