Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
April 29, 2010
Sizwe Banzi is Dead
We’re two weeks away from premiering our fifth and final show of the season, Sizwe Banzi is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. The idea of presenting a Fugard play had been rattling around Court Theatre for many years, and it’s finally come to fruition under the direction of our Resident Artist, Ron OJ Parson. Court’s production is also the final installment in Chicago’s Fugard Fest, following Remy Bumppo’s The Island and Timeline Theatre Company’s ‘Master Harold’...and the Boys.
Sizwe Banzi is Dead was composed in 1972 by a white South African playwright in collaboration with two black South African actors. In creating the play, Kani and Ntshona would improvise large sections of the story, which Fugard would shape and tighten into a finished form. Devised largely from the experience of these three artists, the plot of Sizwe Banzi is Dead is concerned with the government-issued passbook, or “Book of Life,” which recorded and controlled the identity and movement of black South Africans under Apartheid. Those who could not produce their passbook on request were rendered ineligible for employment, kicked out of the white towns, and sometimes thrown into prison. Sizwe Banzi tells the story of one man who steals the passbook of a dead person and changes his identity in order to work and support his family.
Watch this preview for Sizwe Banzi is Dead shot by production dramaturg Kelli Marino and edited by Andrew Carter.
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