Grateful Dead

Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

by Mark Cofta

jeffrey stockbridge READY TO ROLE: Forrest McClendon (left) and Lawrence Stallings make powerful roles in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead their own. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

One might expect a play set during South Africa's apartheid system of separating and subjugating natives would feel dated, given today's democratic reforms. If such a play consisted of preachiness or propaganda, that would be the case: Nothing's more stale than yesterday's politics. But Athol Fugard's plays remain contemporary because he writes about people, not positions — as he does in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, a 1974 collaboration with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona that proves funny, gripping and immediate in Lantern Theater Co.'s exciting revival.

That Sizwe Bansi Is Dead was developed through improvisation explains some of the script's meandering excesses — we don't meet or even hear of the title character until the play's half over — but also its intensely personal power. In director Peter DeLaurier's production, Forrest McClendon and Lawrence Stallings take the roles created by Fugard's collaborators and make them their own.

McClendon particularly, as genial storytelling photographer Styles and then Sizwe's pragmatic protector Buntu, shows his range with a variety of accents (playing not only those two, but all his stories' characters). Styles' tales of working in a South African Ford plant are particularly timely, as he cheerfully but cynically comments on how change occurs in many ways, "but never in the pay packet." His struggle to establish his own photo shop, battling cockroaches and arranging family portraits, amuses and inspires.

Then nervous young Sizwe comes for a photograph to send home to his wife and four children, and we embark on an entirely different and darker story, and learn the why behind the play's title. Suddenly McClendon transforms convincingly into Buntu, aiding Stallings' desperate young laborer lost in a dehumanizing bureaucracy. DeLaurier's production effortlessly shifts time, place and tone to reveal darker truths about individuals in a world where someone else decides who and what they are, lives ruled by the incontrovertible power of "that bloody book," the passes all blacks carried to prove their identity.

Buntu and Sizwe form a palpable bond, finding hope in a hopeless world. At times, they reach out directly to the audience, involving us in their fears and goals, underscoring the fact that politics, inevitably, are personal: Policies affect individuals in ways that politicians rarely appreciate. The message resonates, but it's the vividness of the personalities, the genuineness of the performances, that make Sizwe Bansi Is Dead so alive.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

Sizwe Bansi Is Dead | Through March 1, $20-$35, Lantern Theater Co. at St. Stephen's Theater, 923 Ludlow St., 215-829-0395, lanterntheater.org