The charcoal lines trailing soot; the idiosyncratic, inward figures before cataclysmic world-historical events: William Kentridge is probably most identified with his drawings and their film animations. But theater is a close second. Faustus in Africa!, revived and touring this year for its 30th anniversary, features standalone actors as well as those handling and voicing the large, exquisitely carved wood puppets by Capetown’s Handspring collective. His drawings, projected onto the back scrim to morph and dissolve, comment on and advance the plot. The Jewish Johannesburg native orchestrates it all. The production remains fundamentally the same 30 years on, he says; it is we and South Africa that have changed. In 1995, as the nation was transitioning to democracy, Nelson Mandela’s incoming government was forced to negotiate with the apartheid regime in “a pact with the devil,” Kentridge notes. Today the reckoning—in South Africa and elsewhere—is broader and more fundamental. It is with the whole, awful legacy of colonialism. —Apollinaire Scherr