When I read this week that the great South African playwright Athol Fugard had died, my memories flew back half a century to what I still think of as my most memorable theater-going experience, his Sizwe Banzi is Dead -- starring co-authors John Kani (you may know him as T’Chaka in the Marvel movies) and Winston Ntshona (who passed in 2018). I was 19, sitting front row at a small theater-in-the-round in Boston. A rural rube in the big city, this was my first professional play, and oh my what a startling introduction it was!
Working my way through college as a security guard, I don’t know how I afforded the ticket price, or why I may have gotten the idea to see this play. I do recall that I had a crush on a classmate (whose name escapes me after all these years) and wanted to impress her on our first date. Had I better researched the play (see below), I’d have chosen another option.
Sitting here at my desk this morning, 50 years on, I clearly remember the great duo, Kani and Ntshona, somehow comic and tragic at the same time, debating how to find dignity and identity under the heel of an apartheid that was still a very real thing in their South Africa at that time. The tiny theater placed us all right in their living room, eaves-dropping on it all. I sat rapt; so this is theater, oh my.
And then when Ntshona dropped his drawers, grabbed his junk in a fist and shouted, “Am I not a man?!” everyone in the audience gasped. In the future, living in New York, I’d experience other breath-taking theatrical moments: Charles Dutton falling to the floor and writhing in the grip of an invisible demon in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a fierce, flailing angel breaking through the skylight in Angels in America, a young Kathy Bates stalking offstage to shoot herself in 'Night Mother, and many more. But none of those electric scenes topped that cherry-popping instant in Boston.
After college, training around Europe on a shoe-string, I found myself in debate at a hostel with a trio of young nomads, two Germans and a white South African. When the accusations around apartheid inevitably arose, the Afrikaner deftly threw it right back at us, the Holocaust and – have to admit the dude knew his history – the white conquest of the indigenous peoples in America earned by the sweat of the enslaved. A lesson there, that my people too are complicit in the oppression expressed so profoundly by Fugard’s unforgettable play.
That schooling has lived in me ever since; my new novel The Night Doctor of Richmond is my shot at a midterm exam. In 2025, watching with horror as the White (I mean, really white) House methodically works to erase -- rather than learn from -- our dark history, book banning and even word banning, I can only imagine what Fugard and Kani and Ntshona might think about this new round of racist purges. I sit here this morning grateful for the genius and the courage that brought us that riveting play, and wishing a young Donald Trump had been in that audience.
Or maybe not. His reaction might have been that of my date that evening. Prim New Englander that she was, she recoiled at Ntshona’s full frontal exposure, seemed to blame me for subjecting her to it. It was our first and last date.
btw, discovered this Harvard Crimson review of that show; ain't the Internet amazing?
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