The Market Theater in Johannesburg, built in an old Indian fruit market that's said to have the same dimensions as the Old Globe, is one of those theaters (Ford's in Washington also comes to mind) that helped change a nation's history. From 1976 until the end of apartheid, it illegally let blacks and whites sit in the same audiences and was as much at the center of the theater of protest as any house in Eastern Europe. It is still South Africa's only theater with a worldwide reputation, and yet it receives just scraps from the national arts budget.
On Feb. 19, it gave itself a party. Some American theater chain with an unpronounceable name had given it $50,000. It was the first time the Jujamcyn Theater Award had been given outside the United States.John Kani, who won a Tony Award as best actor in 1975 for his work in Athol Fugard's "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead," was master of ceremonies. "What makes me sad," he said, speaking to the largely white audience on behalf of Black South Africans, "is asking, `Why did we wait so long to make a community out of ourselves?' Because I've always known I've liked you. Sometimes it was hard to let you know when I was making petrol bombs and throwing stones . . . but I've wanted to like you."
He then read from an early history of the theater that described plays put on in black townships with three fluorescent tubes for lighting and the security police in the audience.
"I was tired of looking for another deserving American regional theater," James H. Binger, Jujamcyn's chairman, said in the lobby after the ceremony. "This looked like a better bet."
- Donald G. McNeil Jr.