Theater: Alive and Well

With stage lights blazing and the portrait photographer Styles (John Kani) unleashing an astounding onslaught of verve, the first half of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead is remorseless entertainment. Alone on stage, Styles’ deft flow ranges from rich burnish to glee, spiced with physical grace and bawdy asides (on South African bishops: “They do fuck on their own week; they only work on Sunday”).

Styles once assembled engine blocks, and recounts factory bosses in a tizzy before Henry Ford II’s one-minute inspection: Styles translated new orders to his fellow workers to smile and sing, corrected safety protection warnings (“No, sir, an apostrophe’s a comma upside down”), then donned new overalls and equipment “like Neil Armstrong on the moon.” He impersonates an entire clan posing in his studio for their portrait, culminating with the 92-year-old pater familias, whose face was “a true image of life…and what it does to a man.”

Apartheid and pass laws are the immediate subject in Sizwe Banzi, and the ramifications of racism and oppressive power resonate strongly here in the States. The play was developed in 1972 by Kani, Winston Ntshona and playwright Athol Fugard (Fugard learned the Influx Control system in his work as a Johannesberg law clerk, and would lose his own passport because of his writing). They workshopped in the townships where black workers had to live, incorporating audience responses (a tactic used in The Island, which they performed at BAM in 2003). The authorities hit them with restrictions, but international acclaim was immediate, with Kani and Nthsona sharing the Tony for Best Actor in 1975. Buntu’s activist insistence can sound forced in director Aubrey Sekhabi’s revival at BAM, but Sizwe Banzi’s mechanisms unfold leanly.

Styles’ charisma is infectious—he lures people onstage from the front seats—but Sizwe Banzi is setting its audience up. An offstage knock introduces Robert (Ntshona), and the gears start to grind. In a jazzy white suit, clutching his brown brim, Robert injects the charmed atmosphere with a radical presence. Where Kani/Styles glides and skitters, Ntshona/Robert stilts about as if he might shake to pieces, and his halting sing-song voice commands concentration—an instance of the play’s form fitting its function, as complications are about to ensue. Robert’s rooming with Buntu, of whom Styles says “…if he was white, people would call him a liberal.” The line draws laughs but when Buntu appears (played with darkened intensity by Kani), the subversive implications mount. The two will wind up on a bare stage illuminated eerily by lighting designer Mannie Manim, holding two oranges like Beckett’s tramps. It’s night, they’re drunk, and unease is all around: a pass book filched from an off-stage corpse shows he’s from a vast men’s camp outside Port Elizabeth, and you don’t need to see that oppression to feel it.

When Styles first questions Robert, it’s merely to put a new client at his ease, but interrogation seems omnipresent. Physical antics of miming the auto-assembly line get reprised when Buntu predicts the databasing of ID numbers (“What is the name of those machines they just bought from England? Computers?”). And memorizing a new identity number becomes a bracing lesson in self perception. Then, with its ominous happy ending, Sizwe Banzi is Dead scores one of theater’s elusive goals: the air of unnerving ambiguity.

Through April 19, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; $25–$60.