Leon, Key play kin divided by color
For the AJC
Friday, July 17, 2009
One minute, the brothers revisit their childhood games, pretending to drive an abandoned Chevy from the parched, apocalyptic shantytowns of South Africa into a field of butterflies. The next minute, they are locked in a dangerous game of violence and confrontation — wrestling the accumulated demons of their personal hell.
This is Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” a play that explores the fragile identities of two brothers living in the segregated world of South African apartheid in the 1960s. Morris and Zachariah have a common mother, bloodline and home. They sleep side-by-side in a barren room. But their skin tones, social stations and accents are symbolic of the racial divide that haunts their country and the world at large.
"Blood Knot"
Grade: A-
7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. Through Aug. 2. (No 7:30
show Aug. 2). $20-$35. Theatrical Outfit, Balzer Theater at Herren's, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 678-528-1500, theatricaloutfit.org
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In a timely, relevant production featuring Atlanta theater titans Kenny Leon and Tom Key, “Blood Knot” twists the black and white issue into a crucible of love and hate, comfort and bigotry that harks all the way back to the Bible and fast forwards to today’s headlines about Michael Jackson and Barack Obama.
But unlike so much of the edgy contemporary drama it has influenced, “Blood Knot” does not end in sacrifice or tragedy. Two brothers sit in a room, one hopelessly dreaming of a future, the other pining for the music that’s evaporated from his life. Together they hatch a half-cocked plan to get a woman, and suddenly what began as a harmless joke turns down a twisted path of mockery and loathing. In this play, you never know when a sweet smile will dissolve into a devil’s snarl.
To summarize: Zachariah (played by Leon with a lusty naïveté) sees a pair of copulating donkeys and gets all excited. Morris (portrayed with a perky lilt and a hint of darkness by Key) suggests that his brother find a pen pal, and soon the story is transformed into sub-Saharan “Cyrano,” with Morris penning letters for Zachariah to post to a “well-developed” 18-year-old named Ethel, who happens to be white.
“Blood Knot” operates much of the time like a comedy. It’s reminiscent of a talky Irish play, full of rhythm and banter, buried secrets and absurdist devices (like an alarm clock and that imaginary car ride). There’s a gentleness to it, until you realize that Morris may be a full-out bigot. Or until you hear Zachariah howling in pain: “What is there as black as me?”
Alliance Theatre artistic director Susan V. Booth directs this collaboration between Key’s Theatrical Outfit and Leon’s True Colors Theatre with a precise and intelligent sense of timing and tone, exacting surprising commentaries about the shiftiness of human nature. Designer Leslie Taylor has created a fantastically realized trash heap of a set. Jonida Beqo’s costumes are simple and to the point. Chris Bartelski’s soundscape — snippets of a string duet in which the instruments argue like brothers — helps unify the seven scenes. And Pete Shinn’s pinpoint lighting gives visual and dramatic lift to the emotional arcs of the text.
Fugard’s study of brotherly love sets the passion and pain of sibling rivalry on an especially treacherous landscape of the heart. Langston Hughes’ imagery of “a dream deferred” — dried up like a raisin in the sun, or ready to explode — is a perfect summation of this South African master’s brutal poetry.
