Truth & reconciliation John Kani tells a South African story BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Nothing But the Truth By John Kani. Directed by Janice Honeyman. Set and costumes by Sarah Roberts. Lighting by Mannie Manin. With John Kani, Warona Seane, and Esmeralda Bihl. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre as part of its South African Festival, at the Loeb Drama Center through January 30.

One of the most indelible experiences of my 30 years of professional theatergoing has been the intimate turn by John Kani and Winston Ntshona in The Island, which the pair wrote with Athol Fugard and for which (with Sizwe Banzi Is Dead) they shared the 1975 Tony Award for Best Actor. Kani is now 61 and, as Executive Trustee of Johannesburg’s famed Market Theatre and Chairman of the Apartheid Museum, something of a national institution. He has also made what some consider the first significant contribution to post-apartheid South African drama in the intensely personal, politically complex Nothing But the Truth, which upon its 2002 debut was dubbed by Johannesburg’s Business Day as "South Africa’s Death of a Salesman." Kani himself takes the lead in the play, which is presented here by the American Repertory Theatre as part of its resoundingly successful South African Festival.

In the piece, which is set in 2000, Kani plays 63-year-old Sipho Makhaya, a stoic if cantankerous black South African who after raking an unjust past over the coals becomes his own truth-and-reconciliation commission. Sipho, long-time chief assistant librarian at the Port Elizabeth Public Library, is about to learn whether he will at last get the top job. At the same time, he and daughter Thando are awaiting the arrival of Sipho’s charismatic younger brother, Themba, a "hero of the struggle" who went into exile long before it was over and, having died in London, is returning home to be buried. Accompanying Themba (whose appearance in an urn rather than a coffin horrifies his brother, who had planned a traditional funeral complete with the slaughtering of an ox) is his thoroughly Anglicized daughter Mandisa, a hip young fashion designer who grew up amid the insular safety of the exile community, witnessing the end of apartheid and the subsequent drama of non-violent forgiveness as if through binoculars.

In this Fugard-scaled drama of unresolved sibling rivalry, Kani examines the complicated skein of reunion and resentment that exists in the South African community between those who stayed, suffered, and agitated — perhaps not spectacularly enough to be detained or forced to flee the country — and those who went into exile until the beast was dead and then came home to dance over the corpse. Moreover, Kani serves notice to the present democratic government that much is yet expected. "I paid for this freedom," cautions Sipho, who lost a son to police brutality. "They must never forget the little people like me — who make up the majority that has kept them in power and will still do so for a long time to come." And the actor, who has wrung comic charm from both Sipho’s patriarchal stubbornness and his starchy reserve, rises powerfully to the occasion of the character’s finally letting loose, demanding back from his dead brother everything from a stolen toy and a father’s love to a dead son and a share of the mantle of heroism.

The domestic revelations that emerge once Sipho decides to spill "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" are not terribly surprising, following as they do numerous pregnant hints. And the staging of the play by Janice Honeyman, with the three actors often grouped in conversation-pit formation with Kani at the center, is no more nuanced than the soap-operatic secret at the heart of Sipho’s resentment of his brother.

Still, the play emerges eloquent and moving. There are aspects that resonate personally for Kani, whose own younger brother, to whom the play is dedicated, was shot, like Sipho’s poet son, by government forces while reciting verses at the funeral of a student killed during the uprisings of the 1980s. But the gift of Nothing But the Truth lies in its ability to encompass a sensitive national dynamic in the colorful confines of a small living room in a concrete-block house in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, where Sipho has struggled bravely if modestly all his life while Themba, also a hero if an unabashed "taker," yearned for its earthy smells from afar.

Moreover, in the play’s contrast of respectful Thando, her hair in bright kerchiefs, her belief in the post-apartheid choice to forgive rock-solid, and disruptive Mandisa, with her Camden Town accent, leopard portfolio, and quick-trigger outrage, Kani captures the clash between African tradition and "humanity" and rampant international influence. The good news is that the two women, sharply played by a regal Warona Seane and a saucy Esmeralda Bihl, bond.

Still, Nothing But the Truth belongs to playwright and actor Kani. A self-described storyteller, he so invests himself in his tale of a decent citizen of a democratic South Africa, one who has known heinous injustice but is trying to steer between the human need for revenge and the country’s for healing, that a slight clumsiness in the telling hardly matters.