John Kani returns to '"Master Harold"... and the Boys' after 40 years: 'It's such an incredible journey'

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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.An appreciation of South African playwright Athol Fugard, whose plays that bore witness to the cruelty of apartheid, including ‘Blood Knot,’ ‘Boesman and Lena,’ ‘A Lesson From Aloes’ and ‘My Children! My Africa!’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.

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 theate...