FRONT ROW

by Nina Shengold

When I was in high school and newly in love with the theatre, I upgraded my hippie delinquencies with a classier vice: cutting school to attend Wednesday matinees. The Seventies were the heyday of "Student Rush", when a valid I.D. could get you a last-minute ticket to a Broadway show for a mere five bucks. I’d stash my schoolbooks under a shrub in my New Jersey front yard and board the commuter bus to Manhattan.

Like an awestruck pilgrim, I wandered the theatre district, ogling marquees. Gypsy with Angela Lansbury... Anthony Hopkins in Equus... At the Edison Theatre, a poster for Sizwe Banzi is Dead showed two black men, one laughing beside a photographer's tripod, the other beaming with a pipe in one hand and a cigar in the other. That pose got me wondering: why a pipe and a cigar? Why did these men look so happy? I bought a ticket. The usher escorted me to the front row.

South African actor John Kani opened the play with a tour-de-force monologue. As township photographer Styles, he recounted his years of factory work, saving money to open the tiny studio he called "a strong-room of dreams" for his people. He described some of the dreamers he'd photographed. Then he did the unthinkable. He looked into the audience -- into the front row, at me -- and reached out his hand, inviting me up on the stage for a closer look. Ears flaming with shyness, I shook my head.

Kani beckoned again. The man sitting next to me whispered, "Go on." And somehow I did. I took his hand, clambered over the footlights and floated across the stage in a humming fog of excitement. I don't remember one of the photos he showed me. But I'll never forget Kani's face as he begged me to look. "You must understand one thing," he said, "We own nothing except ourselves. This world and its laws, allows us nothing, except ourselves."

Though it doesn't appear in the script, I'm certain this moment was planned, and repeated at every performance. Perhaps I was chosen because I was sitting alone, in the front row. But I felt anointed. I'd been invited across the threshhold onto a Broadway stage, into the theatre itself.

The play told the story of Styles' customer Sizwe Banzi, a rural naif who traded identities with a corpse in his desperation to get a work permit stamp in his Reference Book, the internal passport that ruled black lives in apartheid South Africa. Kani 's own Reference Book was reproduced in the show’s Playbill. Because South African officials didn’t recognize "artist" as an employment category for blacks, he and co-star Winston Ntshona were forced to register as household employees of white playwright Athol Fugard to get legal clearance to act in his plays. At the curtain call, Kani and Ntshona stood side by side without taking bows, eyes fierce and unsmiling. This play wasn't a fiction that ceased when the lights came back up. Like Styles' photos, it set down an everyday truth; it bore witness.

I was the last person out of the theatre. A weary black usher padded over to ask me to leave, looked at my face and said, "Honey, are you okay?" I nodded and stumbled out into an ordinary Wednesday on West 47th Street. It was daylight. I burst into tears. It didn't seem possible that I had been through so much and the sun was still out. And I knew now, beyond any doubt, what I wanted to do with my life.

Theatre is human connection. As playwrights and actors, we forge stories out of our own raw materials: body, word, and emotion. With the simplest of means -- two actors, a nearly bare stage and some eloquent words -- Sizwe Banzi is Dead led an American teenager not only to a photographer's studio in a South African township, but to the lifelong pursuit of "that strong-room of dreams" we call theatre.

Go Back to Features.