Word: laughs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
John Kani held and played with the audience through his 45-minute monlogue with the comic sense and gyrating energy of a stand-up comic. But his jokes are corny, deliberately innocent of the contrivance of real jokes or comic routines. And we laugh because he laughs, that infectious, throaty, all-teeth laugh that quakes from his chest. He wants us to be happy, with the urgent eagerness of a child wanting to share a joke with his mother...
...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...
...same. As he imagines a rude, rude walk through "about twenty millenniums," Donleavy suggests: "This could be, for those of you who were expecting an afterlife of courtesy, equality and contentment, a good time to break down and cry." Or bare your teeth, throw back your head and laugh like the old Ginger Man. Melvin Maddocks
...muddle through. But Phyllis is paced and played as if it were a zany farce. Fay is hobbled by an ex-husband whose profession is surely borscht-belt comedy. It is impossible to understand why she ever married this yakster. He is a creature of the anything-for-a-laugh desperation that turns both shows into exercises in false hysterics. Still, they are efforts to find the humor in situations that increasingly large numbers of Americans are actually experiencing. Any show that makes even a botched attempt to model itself on life instead of last year's Nielsen winners...