Shining A Light On Apartheid

A 92-year-old man sits in a photography studio in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, surrounded by some two dozen relatives. The photographer, an irresistibly upbeat raconteur named Styles, marvels at the old man’s wizened face: “Looking at it was like paging the volume of his history, written by himself,” he recalls. Two days later, the man dies, commemorated by those relatives but also by the photographic reminder that was assembled just in time.This scene was written collaboratively in 1972 by John Kani (who played Styles, the 92-year-old, and all of those relatives), Winston Ntshona, and Athol Fugard. When this trio co-created the rambunctious and profound parable “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” Mr. Ntshona, who played a tremulous visitor to Styles’s studio, and Mr. Kani were each about 30 years old, barely past the prologue of their own remarkable lives.Mr. Fugard would soon shift away from such joint efforts, writing “Master Harold … and the Boys,” “Boesman and Lena,” and numerous other plays that all but defined apartheid-era South Africa for a generation of Westerners. But his stars and co-writers have periodically revisited their seismic work, which, along with “The Island,” earned them worldwide success (including a Tony-winning stint on Broadway) as well as imprisonment at home. Their latest return, in a vibrant two-week revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music directed smoothly by Aubrey Sekhabi, is said to be Messrs. Kani and Ntshona’s final engagement of “Sizwe Banzi.” Both for the light it shines on the dehumanizing horrors of apartheid and for the exuberance with which it surmounts these woes, it is a history worthy of one last satisfying perusal before those pages are closed.“No smiles. No expressions. Look dead.” Those are the terse instructions given by Styles (Mr. Kani) to those who come for the photos that accompany their dreaded identity books. The books — internal passports that dictated with brutal specificity where black South Africans could work, sleep, or, indeed, exist — can be modified only after appealing to a Kafkaesque litany of ministries and directorates.Styles himself follows precisely none of his own edicts during his day-to-day work. The first 45 minutes of “Sizwe Banzi” are devoted to his gloriously shaggy tales, filled with glib commentary about the day’s headlines, recollections of past assignments, and an infectious delight in his own luck. He previously held a miserable assembly-line job at a Ford factory — as did Mr. Kani in real life — and his memory of a fleeting visit by a member of the Ford family to the factory launches Styles into one of his many virtuosic pantomimes. (Virtually all 28 members of that family also come to life through Mr. Kani’s absurdly spry impersonations.) The tone shifts, however, with the arrival of a man who calls himself Robert Zwelinzima (Mr. Ntshona). This man, as timid as Styles is hearty, wants a snapshot of himself in his brand-new white suit and natty fedora. The rest of “Sizwe Banzi” describes the circumstances that led him to Styles’s door, including the endless indignities of the identity books, the mentorship of the savvy Buntu (Mr. Kani again), and the discovery of a dead body that tempts Robert to “live as another man’s ghost.”This final decision spotlights the indecency of apartheid, both codified and arbitrary, but also the paradoxical freedoms of second-class citizenship. Being invisible in the eyes of a ruling elite gives these men the power to vanish and reappear as it suits them. The question of whether a man can remain himself after such a transformation gives both “Sizwe Banzi” and Mr. Ntshona’s slowly blossoming performance their stealthy power.Mr. Kani’s quicksilver depiction of the glut of life in and around Styles’s Photographic Studio is so captivating that the darker, more overtly political material takes a while to find its rhythms. The segue between the play’s two halves has a slightly rushed feel, a rare slip in Mr. Sekhabi’s liquid staging. And a protracted drunk scene does the later material no favors by further clouding Mr. Ntshona’s already formidable thick South African accent.But once Buntu and Robert make their crucial choice, leavened with the knowledge that any gains are provisional in the face of apartheid, the two actors spur each other to invigorating heights. Messrs. Kani and Ntshona each veer from the play’s absurdist humor to its thick veins of self-scrutiny with a vitality that would exhaust men half their age. These efforts bespeak decades of hard-earned familiarity both with their ebullient text and with the constrained life it depicts so richly.Until April 19 (651 Fulton St., between Ashland and Rockwell places, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).

Shining A Light On Apartheid

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