THE STAGE:

...Never, I suppose, has a Broadway stage seen so much urine, mucus, sweat as Kani and Ntshona bring to their intensely physical performances of men barely surviving in the flesh...

...Styles is interrupted by a customer who wants a picture to send back home to his wife- by Sizwe Banzi, although that is not the name he uses...

...gerald weales...

...All through the play the two men plan-one eagerly, one reluctantly-to present Antigone at a prison concert, and the play offers their variation on Sophocles, an approximation of the original that is at once ludicrous and dignified, a powerful denunciation of South African "law...

...Part of the force of these plays comes from what the black actors and their white collaborator have to say about life in South Africa, but their triumph lies not in any social or political message, but in the fact that they have imposed life on the stage at the Edison...

...Whatever doubts I may have about that form of play-making, induced by productions in which inchoate invention outfoxed artistic control, were stilled last March when I saw an abridged version of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead on English television...

...As both plays end, Creon is linked again to Antigone, imaginary chains at wrist and ankle, and the two prisoners run in tandem, a pantomime scene that recalls the opening of The Island and reminds us that the titular island is a metaphor for a greater enclosure than the prison itself...

...The play then moves back in time to the day in which Buntu (Kani, in a second role) persuades Sizwe to put his picture in the bewysboek of a man they have found dead in the street, to assume a new name and a new history, his only chance to get a job in Port Elizabeth, where a stamp in Sizwe's own book forbids him to remain...

...The portraits, the group pictures, the snaps for all occasions are testimonies to the existence of these black men and women, evidence of real faces in a society which has quit looking at men, has substituted the bewysboek for the person, the number for the individual...

...An interesting play, a good production, but it never prepared me for the impact that Sizwe Banzi-and, even more, The Island-would have on me in the theater...

...The best I can do is record my enthusiastic response...

...He is one of the two playwrights from Africa (Wole Soyinka is the other) to make the clearest artistic claim for a place among the world's leading contemporary dramatists...

...When the play moves back to the photographer's studio, to the idiotically insouciant smile on the face of the man who was once Sizwe Banzi, the play pulls to a close with an unlikely mingling of hopelessness and survival in the truth-telling lie of still another of Styles' evidential artifacts...

...Even so, the Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, all Fugard's early works are so obviously playwright's plays that it was startling news to hear that Fugard-influenced by Jerzy Grotowski-was working with two of his actors, devising (their word) group-created plays...

...In celebrating Fugard's virtues as a writer, I do not want to suggest that there is an anti-theatrical impulse in his work, for Fugard, an actor and director as well as a writer, is a man whose effects are never literary-in the pejorative sense that theater people give to that word-but are married to character and always character as performed...

...Sizwe Banzi is the lighter of the two plays, the funnier, the less painful, but it is impressive in its own way...

...the management must have known that would be the case since The Island gives only two performances a week...

...The shocks in the play, however, come not from the actors' discharges-that would be titillation in the Arrabal manner-but from strangely quiet moments of dramatic intensity, as when an imaginary phone call turns painfully real through the need of the prisoners to reach their families outside or when an excited laugh of expectation is clumsily stifled as one prisoner realizes that the other cannot share his hope for a shortened sentence...

...It opens with a long comic monologue, a play within a play, in which Kani, as Styles, the photographer, recalls his years in a Ford plant (where Kani, in fact, worked) and explains the dream, for himself and his people, implicit in his photographer's shop...

...The Island presents two men, cellmates on Robben Island, the maximum security prison for African political offenders, trying to keep from breaking under the intense pressure, physical and psychological, to which the institution and the men who run it subject them...

...It is not plot, nor situation, nor even character in the conventional sense that is communicated by these plays, but a quality of being by which Kani and Ntshona, with a look, a gesture, an altered intonation, a smile-real or artificial-can convey a place, a dream, a loss or the combination of all three that is black South Africa...

...It is Sizwe Banzi, heavy with rave reviews, that is drawing the bulk of the audience to the Edison...

...I suspect that on paper neither of these plays will approach the quality of The Blood Knot, but the meticulousness mentioned above, the marvelous sense of nuance, is present here, now the creation of the performers rather than the writer...

...My attempt to describe the two plays in conventional terms is finally self-defeating, for they are not so much their subject matter as they are John Kani and Winston Ntshona in action...

...These two plays, devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, with Kani and Ntshona as the only actors and Fugard as director, are presently at New York's Edison Theatre, and they are the most exciting things that I have seen in any theater for a long time...

...The games that Zach and Morris play in The Blood Knot-games that wed Samuel Beckett to the strongest kind of social comment- illustrate that Fugard is a meticulous writer, a master of nuance, subtlety, sophistication...