Ntare Mbaho Mwine

of trying to premiere the play in Uganda, but I just took a big gamble," Mwine says, laughing. "I don't know if I'd do it again the same way, but perseverance was really the ultimate thing, because there were many times when there was a roadblock that just seemed insurmountable." Many of those roadblocks were financial, as is the case for many actors. In addition to obtaining the loan, he had to find money to fund multiple $1,500 trips to Uganda to conduct research and hire people to organize, promote, and run the show. There, he confronted many of the same challenges L.A. and N.Y. actors face in promoting their shows, including the task of persuading strangers to pay money to see someone they haven't heard of. Aside from being an unknown in Uganda, Mwine also faced promoting the project from another continent, which meant relying heavily on people in Uganda to market the show.

It worked. Biro premiered at Uganda's National Theater in January 2003 to a packed house that included Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who attended upon a personal invite from Mwine. Since then Mwine has performed the 90-minute piece at the 2004 African Union summit meeting, where his audience included United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and 30 African heads of state. The show has traveled to London's Drill Hall and New York's Public Theater, as well as to dozens of countries in Africa and around the globe. In 2004 the New York Times selected Biro as a critic's pick, and the BBC aired a 30-minute version of the play throughout Africa.

After three years of touring with the play, Mwine will premiere Biro where the project started, in Los Angeles, at UCLA's Freud Playhouse this week. Mwine's photographic exhibition, Mwerinde Ebiro, which depicts rural and urban areas of Uganda and Cuba, will accompany the show. As with all the stops on his tour, Mwine booked the UCLA Live gig himself by sending in a DVD. "I haven't been waiting for somebody to try to do things," says Mwine. "I've tried to make things happen for myself and feel fortunate that they have."

Mwine studied theatre as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia and earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting from New York University. He landed leading roles at the Lincoln Center, the Steppenwolf Theatre, and American Conservatory Theater, to name a few. In fall 1992, Mwine was cast in the national tour of Six Degrees of Separation and spent three months in L.A. performing at the Mark Taper Forum before returning to New York to star in Off-Broadway productions. In 1997 he moved to L.A., where he appeared in a number of guest roles on series such as ER and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He also exhibited his photography.

When Mwine wrote Biro in 2002, he didn't expect it to become an international sensation. The New Hampshire native only intended to document the life of a family member: a soldier with the Ugandan insurgency who was diagnosed with HIV in Cuba and fled to the United States for treatment, only to be incarcerated in Texas for illegal immigration. "I was just really trying to tell a compelling story in the best way possible," says Mwine. "And his journey was something that dealt with a number of issues that we're struggling with as a nation, in terms of immigrants' rights and access to treatment, and, you know, the struggle for democracy in Africa. These were all issues that were tied into this one character."

From summer 2001 to spring 2002, Mwine recorded a series of conversations with his relative (who prefers to remain anonymous) about his struggles as an imprisoned Ugandan immigrant seeking HIV treatment in the United States. Mwine filled more than 40 tapes, which he then transcribed. He taped the transcript pages all over the walls of his bedroom—"like a madman"—and began highlighting the most interesting parts, a process that took months. Then he began to write, weaving his relative's words into the script along with information he had gleaned from other interviews with Ugandans. He also decided on the character's name: Biro, an abbreviation of the Runyankore phrase "mwerinde ebiro," which means, "Beware of time, because it has the answers." Mwine says the symbolic meaning was intentional. "I felt it really captured the character's spirit, because he's ultimately a survivor," he says.

In the show, Mwine tells Biro's tale of survival from inside a jail cell, wearing only an orange standard-issue prisoner's uniform. The stage is bare except for projected images that guide the audience through Biro's life. The images include photographs of Ugandans who have died of AIDS. These resonated strongly with audience members in Uganda, who approached Mwine after the show and told him they recognized their relatives in the images. He spoke with the families about their personal experiences and revised the production in light of what he learned. "It just helped me in terms of shaping the piece a little more and also just as an actor," he says. Being able to travel to Uganda and record live audio for the multimedia production also helped shape the show, as did Mwine's familiarity with the Ugandan dialect.

The play has enabled Mwine to pay back his loan and buy his first house. He couldn't be happier that his relationship with his agents disintegrated. "I feel grateful," he says. "With the percentage they would have been taking, I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy the house." He notes that his agents have since offered to represent him again. He rejected their offer.

After Biro's L.A. run Mwine will continue to conduct workshops with students at UCLA and California Institute of the Arts to help them develop performance pieces in preparation for World AIDS Day, which is Dec. 1. With no other performances of Biro slated, Mwine hopes to take a break and begin to work on other projects. He plans to go through film footage and negatives he's neglected over the months to shape a few new pieces. In 2004 he wrote, directed, and produced the documentary Beware of Time, about the attitudes and experiences of HIV-positive Ugandans, and he says future projects could also be documentaries, films, or multimedia plays that tackle different subjects. As for the specifics, he hasn't gotten that far. "I can just tell you it involves a bicycle," he says with a laugh.