“Fighting fear and political madness with humor has been my way of life since the 1970s. I always said that the previous government wrote my material for me. That’s why I didn’t pay taxes; I paid royalties.” --Pieter-Dirk Uys

Pieter-Dirk Uys appeared at the American Repertory Theatre to great acclaim in 2005 in Foreign Aids, as part of the A.R.T.’s South African Festival. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1945, and has been in the theatre since the mid-1960s. He was closely associated with both the Space Theatre in Cape Town and Johannesburg Market Theatre during the 1970s and 1980s; he has written and performed 20 plays and more than 30 revues and one-man shows throughout South Africa and abroad. His plays Paradise is Closing Down, Panorama, God’s Forgotten, Faces in the Wall, and Just like Home have been performed internationally, and his one-man shows Adapt or Dye, One Man One Volt, You ANC Nothing Yet, Truth Omissions, Live from Boerassic Park, Dekaffirnated, and Foreign Aids have been presented in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Holland, U.S.A., and Canada. His performance of Foreign Aids at La Mama received the Obie Award in New York in 2004. Most of his satirical work is available on video, and so, despite of government censorship during apartheid, he built up a very large multiracial audience. His one-man satire celebrating ten years of democracy, The End is Naai, was performed throughout South Africa in 2004 and abroad, as was Elections & Erections.

Uys lives in a small town near Cape Town on the West Coast of South Africa called Darling. There he has converted the old railway station into a cabaret venue called “Evita se Perron” (Perron is Afrikaans for “station platform”).