Performers Percy Mtwa, left, and Mbongeni Ngema in a scene from "Woza Albert" at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1981. Ruphin Coudyzer/AP hide caption

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Ruphin Coudyzer/AP

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—When it first started in the 1970s, South Africa's Market Theatre staged plays considered to be so subversive that it became a regular target of the apartheid government's zealous censors.

Even the fact that its audiences were made up of Black and white South Africans mingling together was unheard of in a city where the law separated areas and people by race.

The theater, established in an old fruit and vegetable market in central Johannesburg, was born at a pivotal time in "the Struggle" — the fight against the apartheid government.…