John Kani returns to ‘”Master Harold”… and the Boys’ at the Geffen

John Kani was on his way to joining the Umkhonto We Sizwe paramilitary wing in 1965 when he took a detour to a Serpent Players drama group rehearsal in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

There, Kani’s friend Fats Bookholane introduced him to a company member he’d mistaken for a custodian.

“John, this is Athol,” Bookholane said, gesturing to the legendary South African playwright Athol Fugard. Before that day, Kani had never made the acquaintance of a white person on a first-name basis.

Fugard’s friendship — along with that of fellow Serpent Player Winston Ntshona — became among the most formative of Kani’s life. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, the trio created rousing anti-apartheid protest theater that brought global attention to South African oppression at great personal risk. Kani was heavily surveilled, arrested, brutally beaten and even lost his left eye for his perceived indictments of the South African government.

Now, a year after Fugard’s death, Kani — one of South Africa’s most beloved actors — is returning to the acclaimed playwright’s most personal work, “‘Master Harold’… and the Boys,” opening Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse. The play, which centers on the fraught relationship between a white South African teenager and two Black employees who work for his family, is co-directed by Emily Mann and the Geffen’s Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney, with Kani co-starring alongside Ben Beatty and Nyasha Hatendi.

Ben Beatty, left, and John Kani in “‘Master Harold’… and the Boys” at the Geffen Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

During an interview after a recent rehearsal, Kani said he views his role as the elder employee, Sam, in the Geffen production as a tribute to Fugard, without whom the actor may never have pursued theater. When Kani first met Fugard, several leading opponents of apartheid including Nelson Mandela had just been convicted and imprisoned on Robben Island, and hope for liberation was running dry.

“I was very angry. I had the burning desire for freedom, and I knew the freedom is on the other side of the street, meaning white, meaning I got to kill all those people to get my freedom,” Kani said.

Fugard told him, “I can help you tell stories. I don’t know how to make a bomb.”

“Without bumping into him that day, I would never have been in the arts at all,” Kani said.

“I am truly blessed that at 82, I’ve been given the opportunity to tell this story again for this audience, in tribute to this wonderful man,” John Kani said.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Kani’s best-known performance in “‘Master Harold’” is as the younger employee, Willie, in the 1984 film adaptation co-starring Matthew Broderick and Zakes Mokae. However, Kani played Sam in the play’s 1983 South African premiere, adding an extra layer of meaning to his Geffen reprisal of the role.

In his earliest appearances as Sam, Kani had to apply gray makeup to his beard and temples to be believable as the middle-aged employee. More than 40 years later, at 82, he has the opposite problem.

“Look at me,” he jested, pulling off his cap to reveal sparse pearly fuzz.

Nonetheless, Mann insisted that Kani was suited for the role, telling him, “you are now the right age to understand what this play is.”

“So now I’m back, the same but a little older and I know a little more, and it’s such an incredible journey,” Kani said.

Directing the show has also been an epic adventure for Mann, dating back to a series of trips she took to Soweto in the late ‘80s to speak with Winnie Mandela.

Back then, Mann was recruited to write a miniseries about the activist and wife of Nelson Mandela. She knew she needed much more detail than she could glean from newspaper clippings, so she traveled to Soweto. Winnie was under house arrest, and Fugard helped Mann get in to see her.

“When I was there, her home was shot at and nearly firebombed twice. I mean, it was rough times,” Mann said. “Why I thought I was so immortal? I have no idea, and believe me, my family was not pleased. But it was an extraordinary opportunity to understand that world, and I wasn’t going to let that story go.”

“It’s sad, but also nice to be connected with John and see the journey of [“‘Master Harold’”] and this new iteration of it today,” Nyasha Hatendi said.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fugard once told Mann she took more trips to Soweto in a single month than he did in his entire lifetime. “At any rate, he put his life on the line for longer,” she said.

In Mann’s eyes, the South African government’s disastrous bid for absolute political power is a cautionary tale with particular resonance today.

“This is exactly the play and the right moment for this play in America, or maybe worldwide, because of what’s going on politically in the world,” Mann said. “We’re slipping into authoritarianism and white supremacy again, and this play reminds you of the effects of both of those evils.”

At the same time, “‘Master Harold,’” which hews closely to Fugard’s own experiences, is a tale of hope.

With its cast of characters essentially plucked from Fugard’s early life in Port Elizabeth, the play introduces Hally (a stand-in for Fugard) at a crossroads. In his late teens, Hally finds himself torn between his child and adult selves — the former adoring Sam and Willie, and the latter taught to hate them.

“Athol knew the poison in his father was wrong,” Mann said. “He knew in his gut that this system was wrong, and he knew it early, but he also got infected. He said he was well on his way to what could have become an incredible bigot, but it was [the real-life] Sam that pulled him back from the cliff.”

“If you look at Hally in this play, he was destined to be a white racist. Everything around his life — his family, his school, his environment — always preach one thing: you’re white, you’re white, you’re white,” Kani echoed.

“Then the miracle happened,” the actor said: Fugard emerged from that milieu an impassioned writer fixed on defying white supremacy through his work.

When the cast is rehearsing at the Geffen, he added, “[Fugard] is present in that room.”

“The greatest gift of Athol Fugard is to tell a very controversial political story, and ignore the politics of it completely and just follow the human beings. He always said to me, ‘Leave the leaders in front, write about the people behind,’” John Kani said.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

For Geffen co-stars Beatty and Hatendi, it has been a privilege to work alongside two people who knew Fugard so intimately and understood apartheid South Africa so thoroughly.

“We have an encyclopedia of context that John can provide us about not just Athol himself — Hally, Athol — but all of the characters in the play,” Beatty said, adding that having real stories to reference has made his work onstage feel more authentic.

But Mann and Kani are also careful not to restrict the play to their realities, knowing that to feel true today, the story needs room to breathe.

“John and Emily at least from my experience have been open to letting things evolve,” Hatendi said. “There’s still discoveries that are being made in the room that are informing the way that they play it.”

That “weird, wonderful alchemy” will only deepen with audiences’ interpretations of the show, the actor added.

Kani thinks about his role in this production somewhat like his role as a grandfather. He answers questions when he’s asked, but he’s also learning not to overexplain. Just recently with his granddaughter, he almost slipped into a lecture, when he thought better of it.

“Let her make her own footpaths and whole mark in this world,” he told himself. “Let her see this world with different eyes, full of hope.”

And even though it’s not every day, he said, “I sometimes wake up that way.”