"Sizwe Bansi' vs. "The Rant' (2nd Reviews)

Last week I saw both the Lantern's and Interact Theatre's respective productions of Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Rant. While both were expertly directed and featured formidable performances of plots driven by moral-issues, one of them felt dated and of little consequence, while the other found continuing and universal relevance.

I saw the Lantern's production of Athol Fugard's play first, which portrayed the young worker Sizwe Bansi (Lawrence Stallings) imprisoned inside the machinations of South Africa's apartheid system. The stamps in his government-issued passbook restrict him to work in Port Elizabeth, where he's supposed to live with his wife and four children. But there's no work there, so he has journeyed to New Brighton, where he can't work because the local bureaucrats won't give him a permit. While he's out drinking with Buntu (Forrest McClendon), they stumble upon a recently murdered corpse, and the situation presents the innocent Sizwe with a rogue dilemma: either steal the dead man's passbook and find work, or continue to live as a fugitive from the state.

Andrew Case's The Rant appears less straightforward. Denise Reeves, an African-American woman (Kimberly S. Fairbanks), claims to have seen the white police sergeant Clark murder her autistic teenage son on her front porch, with the assistance of the black cop Simmons (Aldo Billingslea). The New York Police department buries the investigation, so Reeves turns to Lila Mahnaz (Elena Araoz), who heads a civilian review board that handles complaints and oversees internal police investigations. Mahnaz believes Reeve's version and launches a personal crusade against Simmons, sensationalizing the case with the assistance of Alexander Stern (David Ingram), a cynical crime reporter. In a post-modern era, where truth is considered "another type of bias," the question of "Who's watching the watchmen?" takes on considerable moral significance.

The solution seemed a no-brainer

While I enjoyed the Lantern's production, I didn't feel compelled by Sizwe Bansi's agonizing over whether or not to defy an unjust regime so that he could survive. At first I assumed this reaction was a reflection on me. After studying philosophy for more than a decade, Sizwe's relatively simple problem— explored by philosophers from Plato through Hobbes to contemporaries like Robert Nozick— seemed like a no-brainer: Take the passbook and get on with your life. But with such a well-written script and incredible production, I worried about my inability to feel engaged by moral dilemmas.

But then I watched The Rant and felt reawakened to the power of theater in presenting challenging ideas that not only affect our time but all human societies. Case's play exposed me to at least a half-dozen pertinent and enduring dilemmas, from how does a police officer balance professional ethics with the measured response needed to confront a "city taken over by savages" to where do a journalist's professional commitments lie? In an age of declining newspaper circulation, is truth "just another bias," no longer essential for democracy and better supplanted by the self-serving goal of sensationalism that gets an article placement on page one?

Case couples these problems with the question of whether an African-American cop should be "black before he's blue," which has relevance to any racially heterogeneous society in which members of a minority advance into positions of authority. And in any government (especially one enforced by federal wire-taps), "who is watching the watchman" becomes a fundamental question indeed.

Fugard's missed opportunity

After seeing The Rant, my problem with Sizwe Bansi dawned on me. Fugard raises an eternal question, but his play ties itself too narrowly to apartheid. Fugard avoided this sort of contextualization when he explored similar themes in his prison-drama The Island, which could just as easily take place in the Jim-Crow era South, in pre-Kristallnacht 1930s Germany, in modern Israel, or in Guantanamo.

To be sure, the central theme of Fugard's play is one we can all identify with: oppression as manifested in the "passbook" identification system issued to all non-whites under apartheid. When this tool for controlling movement was first introduced in South Africa, the white government called it "the book of life," and said passbooks represented freedom for blacks. Similar measures—with the same promise of ensuring freedom— have been proposed here and in Britain, and always with the same (apartheid-like) purpose: the regulation of undesirable minorities (illegal immigrants and/or terrorists). But Fugard's clear references to apartheid and to the Nixon era tie Sizwe Bansi too closely to the 1970s and a now defunct regime. Consequently, Fugard's piece appears more like a well-acted Socratic dialogue than a play— enjoyable, but a pedantic piece of literary history.

Unlike the dated sense I got from Sizwe Bansi, the moral dilemmas in The Rant are awesome in their current relevance. Each character's monologue disrupts a previously accepted point of view. David Ingram's convincing cynicism as the tabloid journalist particularly amazed me (especially having seen him play a much different kind of reporter a few years ago in Tuesdays with Morrie). I felt chills as Araoz translated Juvenal's Latin phrase that drives her character, the civilian investigator. When The Rant ended, and the "truth" surfaced, I felt unsure of whom to trust or believe. I'm still thinking about and trying to solve Case's expertly crafted set of moral dilemmas.





To read another review of The Rant by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review of Sizwe Bansi by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a response, click here.