Word: ntshona
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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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 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...
...Winston Ntshona, with his missing teeth, child-like face, wistful smile and pucker, is a slower character. He chews through a heavy accent. He thinks slowly, with his body. When he is considering something, we can see the thought travelling sluggishly up through his body, from his heavy limbs, through his fidgetting torso, up to his frowning puzzled pucker. He seems a combination between what Kael described in Brando--his emotions originating deep in his chest, then reverberating slowly to the extremities and finally to the face--and John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a dull-witted...
...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...