Review - Blood Knot

When Signature announced they were going to be doing Athol Fugard plays this season to inaugurate their new space, I was very excited.  I’ve been a huge fan of his work for years, though I’ll admit to only seeing Master Harold…and the boys until recently.  I loved Road to Mecca when I saw it earlier this season.  Plus, I’ve read quite a few of the other plays in the past and found them quite moving, so I imagine I was predisposed to enjoy myself last night at Blood Knot.  And enjoy myself I did.  It was thrilling and horrifying, in the way only the best theater can be.  In my opinion, of course.

The theater space itself is very similar to the space where the Albee piece is playing, lots of wood and air, though I think it has less seats and seems to be narrower in the width.  But the sightlines still seem fine.  I was off to the far left and didn’t miss anything.  Oh, wait, now that I think about it, the gals sitting even further left than me missed a little bit at the end.  But considering we weren’t really friends, it didn’t bother me.  More on them later.

Beautifully directed by Fugard himself, the play takes place on a set representing a dilapidated shack in 1960s South Africa, though the walls are false, which will come into play at the end of the evening.  It was actually interesting to me to be able to see the back wall of the theater, which designated the space and freedom that these characters are denied throughout.

The play is about two brothers who live together in squalor.  They do a lot of play-acting and re-enacting childhood games to get through one night to the next.  One brother is extremely dark-skinned, one is light enough to pass for white (remember that the play takes place in 1960s South Africa), but their difference in skin color isn’t really mentioned in the first act, which is relatively comic in tone, though it remains uneasily bubbling under the surface. The pain and resentment shakes itself loose with a fury in the second act, when Morrie’s decision to find Zach a female pen-pal to substitute for a real woman sets the conflict in motion after the pen-pal turns out to be white.

The dark-skinned brother (Zach), played with searing reality by Colman Domingo, is the laborer; the light-skinned brother (Morrie), played with amazing physical dexterity but a little over-broadly in the language by Scott Shepherd, is the caretaker and apparent ‘brains’ of the operation. Morrie can read and write, which he takes as his right to be the one to handle the money and plan for the future.  Zach yearns for simpler pleasures, like beer and women, but yields to his brother’s desire to save money for their future.  At least for a while. 

Colman Domingo is nothing short of astonishing as Zach.  At first, his physical and verbal tics seem to indicate some sort of mental disability (at least to me), but as the play progressed, you see that he’s adopted them as a coping mechanism, and in his harrowing monologue to his mother, you see exactly where they started and why.  He broke my heart during this monologue, and all of the charm and resourcefulness he showed previously just fell away as he succumbed to the reality of his life as a black man. 

While watching the play, I didn’t love Scott Shepherd quite as much – I just felt he way overplayed, but, in thinking back about the play, I guess it could’ve been a character choice.  Morrie can be overplaying his affability as the light-skinned brother, because he has such guilt  over the different realities of his life and his brother’s.  He has a beautiful moment in the first act where he puts on his brother’s coat, and talks about being surrounded by Zach’s skin.  Is he really trying to understand what it’s like to be his brother?  To assuage his guilt?  It’s not really clear, though we get closer to understanding during the last scenes. 

But in the last scenes, where the brothers play out one last ‘game,’ oh.my.god.  It was just harrowing and thrilling and terrifying.  They both want it, but they don’t.  I started sobbing, loudly.  It was so sad and so beautifully written.  All of a sudden, you’re hit in the face with their reality even though it’s played in a highly poetic, other-worldly sort of way.  As the walls fall away, and the two engage in the age-old battle between black and white/brother vs brother, I was just devastated, not just for these characters, but with the realization that even though apartheid is gone, these racial tensions still aren’t.  The resentments and pain and rage are always there.  And that made me cry, too.  For me, everything just sort of came together in a fantastic catharsis. 

The gals next to me weren’t moved nearly as much as I was.  In fact, when I started sobbing, one of them said (in an outdoor voice), “Really?!”  I fully understand that every play doesn’t speak to everyone in the same way, but I was definitely annoyed to have my experience questioned.  I almost said something to her on my way out, but I decided to quickly leave and go cry in the bathroom, to continue enjoying my theatrical experience.  I guess I should feel sorry she didn’t get to have one.  I'll have to think on it.  But I firmly believe everyone should go go go see this play.

**five years ago, I reviewed Alan Ball's All That I Will Ever Be (a mixed review that references the Gay Whisperer, which can't have been good); three years ago, I reviewed the acclaimed David Cromer version of Our Town.  I'm glad I didn't see this show after I became a vegetarian - even thinking of it now makes me want bacon...