THEATER REVIEW: "Sizwe Banzi is Dead" ★★★½ Through June 13 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes; Tickets: $32-$56 at 773-753-4472
In apartheid South Africa, those born without a white skin were forced to carry a reference book to prove the legality of their presence in a major city like Port Elizabeth. And at one point in “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” the remarkable two-person play penned by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona and first performed in 1972, a man named Buntu opens up the passbook of one Sizwe Banzi.
Banzi can’t read, and therefore he had missed a notation therein. Telling him to get out of the whites-only area. And with that agonizing piece of new information dispensed to his humble but dignified character at the Court Theatre, the Chicago actor Allen Gilmore crumples before your eyes.
It’s a staggering moment — I can see it in my mind as I write.
Gilmore, an actor who has rarely had the attention his work in this town has long deserved, is a physically adroit and deeply empathetic performer whose body always fully expresses what’s in his character’s soul. And this is one of the two most important moments in the play (the other flows from when Buntu figures out that the only way for the proud-and-reluctant Sizwe to circumvent the rule is to kill himself off and take over another man’s body). All of Fugard’s drama crystallizes the myriad inhumanities of life under the Apartheid regime into simple human moments involving ordinary people. And you don’t get much more direct than being told you have no ownership over your own movements.
Gilmore shows us the air disappearing from a man’s body and the fight from his heart. It’s like watching a punctured human tire.
His determinedly optimistic pal, Buntu (played at Court, in spectacularly fearless fashion, by Chike Johnson), eventually puts it back. And as he does so, we understand the central dichotomy of this play. Some of us find it easy to keep our optimistic spirit in oppressive situations. Some of us have to be coaxed into asserting ourselves. The trick, the play seems to be saying, is to find that sweet spot between maintaining your dignity and honor, and doing what you have to do to survive.
The situation may be two men oppressed by apartheid, but the same rules can apply in your office.