Word: banzie
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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...Sizwe Banzi is Dead. At the Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton Street, through October 19. Performances Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m., Saturday matinee at 2 p.m., Sunday matinee...
...SIZWE BANZI AND The Island are expositional, didactic and propagandizing. That would be a simple criticism if the didactic aspect of the plays were a necessary, extra-literary appendage--soothing balm for liberal consciences, good drama with a cause, candy-coated political message. But the message is not so simple...
...fact, the two plays have been criticized for presenting a blunted, inadequate condemnation of apartheid, and avoiding the brutality and inhumanity of South African racism. Sizwe Banzi accepts the rules of apartheid in sacrificing his identity for the immediate reward of being able to work in Port Elizabeth. The prisoner, John, is overjoyed by his imminent release, and submits even more servilely to the daily humiliations in order not to jeopardize it. His mind is wholly filled with the expectation of domestic happiness, meeting his wife, his family. He never questions the authority that jailed him in the first place...
...SIZWE BANZI and The Island are Kani and Ntshona. Kani and Ntshona laugh, cry, joke, pray, confide, console, with the unforced naturalness of the neighbors next door, but glow in our dreams and memories even weeks after the performances with a stunningly vivid brilliance. It is as if we had swallowed whole a complete vocabulary of previously undiscovered emotions, gestures, and facial and body expressions. A particular situation, the gesture of a friend, can, at some of the most unexpected moments, trigger the memory of an image or scene from the plays, much as we are suddenly reminded by smells...
...world that emerges in these plays is a variegated, richly human, willfully troublesome one, one that Styles accepts with philosophical resignation, a shrug of the shoulder, and a toothy laugh. Sizwe Banzi and The Island are political plays about the horror of apartheid, but they are much more than that; the world they create is a world of futility, reminiscent of novels about India, by Indian writers writing in English, such as Narayan and U.S. Naipal. Like Naipal's Mr. Stone, Styles has the distinctive resigned sensibility of a colonized people, an intelligent people who know their supposed masters...