Review - Blood Knot

It's not your garden variety playwright who can draw you into a two-person drama with an extended dialogue comparing the healing effectiveness and fragrance of competing brands of foot salts. But the comfortable comic exchanges that sweeten the early moments of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot cleverly turn horrific by the final blackout, thanks to an excellent pair of performances created under the playwright's own direction.

Premiering in 1961 with one performance in Johannesburg and eventually reaching Off-Broadway in 1964, Blood Knot was the first piece to bring international attention to the South African whose plays helped educate the world of everyday life during apartheid.

The story is set in the ramshackle home shared by half-brothers Morris (Scott Shepherd) and Zach (Colman Domingo). Though they were raised by their black biological mother, their different fathers are the reason the dark-skinned Zach and the light-skinned Morris would be unrecognizable as brothers.

With Morris able to pass for white, they make a meager living and spend much of their time playing adolescent fantasy games, one of which has the educated Morris helping Zach start a correspondence with a woman advertising for a pen pal. But when the woman sends a photo, revealing herself to be white, and writes that she'll be visiting their area and wants to meet, it leads to the surfacing of attitudes and resentments previously bottled inside, signaled throughout the play by the periodic rings of a symbolic alarm clock.

After a jarring moment involving Christopher H. Barreca's set, a dilapidated hut seeming safely isolated from reality, they play out the most disturbing of their inner fantasies. Shepherd and Domingo do exceptional work balancing the text's abstract moments with a realistically uneasy bond between the brothers. While the play has its slow-moving sections and seems a bit stretched by the end, the evening's high points are potent, particularly if you place yourself as a viewer back in the 1960s.

Photo of Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo by Joan Marcus.

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