Word: kani
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...minutes of The Island are an intense, powerful theatrical experience, a pantomime of toil and fatigue, blood and pain. The rest of the play is inevitably an anti-climax that never fully lives up to the expectations and intense atmosphere set up by the play's beginning. When Kani exhibits the quick comic energy that worked so well in Sizwe Banzi, although the audience is laughing and the comic relief much needed, it is as if the high drama of the opening is reduced to situation comedy. John's comic exasperation in teaching the plot of Antigone to slow-witted...
...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...
...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...