E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dressed to thrill Meet South Africa’s political Uys BY SALLY CRAGIN

With a trunk full of costumes and a passionate commitment to promoting HIV/AIDS awareness, South African writer/performer Pieter-Dirk Uys (pronounced Ace) is sui generis — a one-man comedy juggernaut of political satire and a practitioner of "political incorrectness." He makes his Boston debut with a new solo show, Foreign Aids, courtesy of American Repertory Theatre’s ongoing South African Festival, and promises "a look into another world."

It’s a world rich in such personalities as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former South African president P.W. Botha, who presided over the last years of apartheid. But others whom Uys channels are his own creations, among them Afrikaner Evita Bezuidenhout, "the most famous white woman in South Africa," and her sister, unrepentant racist Bambi Kellermann, "Pamela Anderson without the bosoms."

Speaking by phone from his home in Darling, Uys talked about his themes and related stagecraft, which includes transforming into characters in front of the audience. He began doing this in the 1980s, when his political comments attracted government disapproval. "I was scared to go backstage because the police will get me," he explains. "I thought I’d stay on stage with my box of tricks and then run."

With her elaborate coiffure and matronly couture, Evita might seem a cousin to Barry Humphries’s Dame Edna Everage ("the only comparison is that Barry and I are middle-aged men with good legs," Uys deadpans), but Evita’s a political creature at heart. "I think she represents the amnesia we suffer in this country," he says. "Part of my job with her is to make people in South Africa see we’re not Bosnia. People expected apartheid to end in a bloodbath and it didn’t. I don’t want people to forget the extraordinary luck we had with Mandela."

Uys performed at La MaMa ETC in New York last year, and he finds numerous parallels between present-day terror-focused America and apartheid-era South Africa. He notes that Botha "used words like ‘our war on terror’ and ‘if they’re not for us they’re against us.’"

The new show includes material from the satirist’s lifelong repertoire, but ART executive director Robert Orchard says current events in America "might provide him with an appropriate level of outrage." Orchard continues, "His style is very embracing and truthful — even his e-mails are hysterical. I can’t wait to get him here — I think he’s going to energize us all."

For the first two years of Mandela’s government, Uys refrained from on-stage commentary, but he couldn’t stay on the sidelines for long. Though he supported the first post-apartheid leader, he was angered by "the extraordinary dichotomy where 600 people die every day because the government does nothing about HIV/AIDS."

And so he began another career, as a one-man AIDS-awareness campaign. For the past five years, Uys has traveled to schools and spoken frankly about the disease to children. He charges no money and cites his crusade as "my biggest card of independence, my freedom of speech. Now I’ve met kids who aren’t kids, they’re 20. And they say, ‘Five years ago, you spoke to my school and I didn’t know about this thing, and now I know and I’m safe.’"

Perhaps the entertainer/crusader’s current endeavors aren’t so far from his childhood aspirations, which included wanting to be a Calvinist minister ("because they went straight to heaven"). "In my sensible years, I wanted to be a teacher, and then the theater hijacked me," Uys sighs. But in the meantime, there’s no shortage of material: "Government will never let me down — my best scriptwriters are the politicians," he says.

Foreign Aids is presented by the American Repertory Theatre, in association with the Market Theatre, at Zero Arrow Theatre, 2 Arrow Street in Harvard Square, January 5 through 23. Tickets are $12 to $45. Call (617) 547-8300 or visit www.amrep.org.