Word: banzie
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THEIR BEWYSBOEKS--required identification booklets--say that John Kani and Winston Ntshona are private servant employees of Athol Fugard, the white South African playwright with whom they have collaborated to "devise" Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, now in Boston for their last performances in the United States. "Actor" is not recognized by apartheid South Africa as a possible profession for blacks, so Kani and Ntshona, the best actors you will have a chance to see on stage for a long time, remain second-class citizens, despite a three-year international tour that has garnered universal rave reviews...
...Sizwe Banzi is Dead begins with a rambling, anecdotal, seemingly spontaneous monologue that makes up almost the first half of the play. It is a way of setting the stage for an American audience--Styles (John Kani) leafs through a newspaper commenting on whatever happens to catch his eye, joking about expresidents and the like, and finally settling into a long, bitter description of the servility of black workers in a Ford motors plant and the frenzied preparations in the plant when Henry Ford descended from rich mythical America for a visit. There is a swift transition to the play...
...drunken self-righteousness and rebellion, he at first refuses to steal the bewysboek and take on the dead man's identity, because for a black man in South Africa, his name is all that he has, the last proof of his manhood. But he finally relents, and Sizwe Banzi is dead...
...Sizwe Banzi is Dead, by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, opened to ecstatic reviews is New York. The performances of the two back South African actors who make up the cast came in for particularly glowing praise, but some critics felt the play treats the subject of apartheid too lightly, sidestepping the harshness and brutality. Still, this is definitely a play worth seeing. At the Charles Playhouse, 76 Warrenton St. In Boston, tonight at 8 and tomorrow...
...Other winners: Best Play, Equus; Best Director of a Play, John Dexter (Equus); Best Actors and Actress in Plays, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island), and Ellen Burstyn (Same Time, Next Year); Best Actor and Actress in Musicals, John Cullum (Shenandoah) and Angela Lansbury (Gypsy...