Blood Knot

Pershing Square Signature Center, New York

(212) 244-7529

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Athol Fugard’s drama is a work of many firsts, said Linda Winer in Newsday. When this first major drama by the South African playwright premiered, in 1961, it marked the first time blacks and whites ever acted onstage together in his country. Now, 50 years later, this Fugard-directed production has inaugurated a new Frank Gehry–designed Manhattan theater complex whose jewel-box feel couldn’t be further removed from the stark lives depicted onstage. Set in an apartheid-era shantytown, Blood Knot concerns two restless half brothers—dark-skinned Zachariah and Morris, light enough to “pass” as white—who are conspiring to escape the grimness of their present existence.

Colman Domingo and Scott Shepherd are “at their best” in early scenes, when they’re “accentuating the comical rapport” between the brothers, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Morris, who’s returned to Zachariah’s shack after living among white South Africans, now dotes on his more disadvantaged brother “with an almost maternal devotion,” even helping the illiterate Zachariah acquire a female pen pal after he says he longs for a woman’s companionship. But when the brothers learn that the woman writing to Zachariah is a white South African, the production becomes “more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging.” The “unruly feelings” unleashed by the brothers’ discovery poisons their relationship, proving apartheid’s destructive force, yet neither actor manages to make palpable the play’s “anguished depths.”

The actors’ light touch is actually crucial to this production’s effectiveness, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. By emphasizing the brothers’ habit of acting out fantasies together, Fugard has placed these two Beckettian characters in a dream world apart from history, where apartheid still has symbolic power even though the system itself was dismantled two decades ago. “Judging from this revival, I’d say that Blood Knot will remain fresh for some time to come.”