Presented by Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 W. 65 St., NYC, Dec. 8-Jan. 18.
South African actor-playwright John Kani is best known in New York for his Tony Award-winning performances in "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead" and "The Island," and for his work with Athol Fugard. Now, he returns as the star of his own play, "Nothing but the Truth," which had its world premiere last year at Johannesburg's Market Theatre. With the original director, Janice Honeyman, and an all-South African cast, "Nothing but the Truth" is a gripping and powerful family drama of how apartheid affected one black South African family.
The play is an insider's view of the strained and complicated relationships between those black South Africans who stayed in their homeland and dealt with apartheid on a daily basis and those exiles who returned to great acclaim after Nelson Mandela's release. By telling one symbolic story, the play becomes a metaphor for the plight of a whole nation.
Kani plays Sipho Makhaya, an assistant librarian who is notified that his exiled activist brother's body is being flown back from London for the funeral. His daughter Thando (played by Warona Seane) recognizes that her father is greatly distressed but also hiding something. When Sipho's niece Mandisa MacKay (Esmeralda Bihl) arrives from London for the funeral, her portrait of her late father does not tally with Sipho's memories. The stage is set for a revelation of nothing but the truth.
Honeyman's leisurely pacing belies the dramatic fireworks that explode in the play's last third. The three actors seem to be using three different acting styles, but this may be intentional. Playing the older generation, Kani is mannered and measured, whereas Bihl, as his London fashion-designer niece, is all push and go. Seane takes a more balanced middle ground. In any case, the offstage brother becomes as real to us as if he were present.