Fugard's 'Blood Knot' in New York

The lobby of Frank Gehry's striking new Signature Theatre Center near Times Square seems to stretch for miles. With its wide, white walls, its warm-blond wood trim and its smooth gray granite floors, it's both spacious and inviting.

But the beauty of the Signature resides not only in its spectacular new spaces. It also resides in that little bearded gray-haired man sitting hunched over on a bench outside the theater where one of his early plays, Blood Knot, is being performed. The unassuming South African playwright Athol Fugard, one of the heroes of contemporary theater, can be found on that bench most evenings this spring, tending to three of his plays that are being produced by this theater whose mission it is to honor a different playwright each season.

Fugard's remarkable life in the theater has set a moral example of courage, principle and tenacity. For founding a biracial company in his hometown of Port Elizabeth, he suffered the wrath of South Africa's apartheid government for decades. After Blood Knot was first performed in Johannesburg in 1961, featuring Fugard (a white actor) and Zakes Mokae (a black actor), both were arrested, the play was banned and new laws were passed forbidding racially mixed casts and audiences in South African theaters.

For decades, Fugard's home was raided, his telephone tapped, his passport revoked. But Fugard continued to write and produce brave, biracial plays about life in a country he loved despite the anguish it caused him. When apartheid was finally abandoned in 1994 under Nelson Mandela, Fugard was widely credited for playing an important role in its dissolution.

So to return today to Blood Knot, a definitive modern work about race, is a doubly moving and meaningful experience.

Brothers with one difference

This modest two-character play features Morris, a light-skinned South African, and Zachariah, his black-skinned brother (played beautifully by Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo). Nothing much happens in the one-room shanty that they share in a poor section of Port Elizabeth. Zachariah works as a gatekeeper, preventing blacks from entering the whites-only park.

In Act I we follow the brothers through their daily rituals. Each evening Zachariah returns home, where Morris awaits him with a hot meal and a pail of warm water and Epsom salts to soothe his blistered feet (Zachariah's cruel white boss, who calls him "boy," forces him to stand all day).

This production glows with the simplicity and warmth of everyday life and the affection the brothers feel for each other, as they pray together and share memories of their mother and her songs ("Just a touch of sadness and a grey dress on Sundays," they recall).

Morris is saving their meager earnings to buy a farm, but Zachariah's dreams are more immediate: He longs for a woman. So Morris finds the name of Ethel Lange in the newspaper's classified section and Zachariah begins a correspondence with her. (Or, rather, Zachariah dictates and Morris writes, since Zachariah is illiterate.)

Passing for white

Act II reaps the fruits of the brothers' epistolary labors. Ethel has written to announce that she's coming to Port Elizabeth to meet Zachariah, who is overjoyed to hear the news Morris reads aloud to him"“ only to panic when he discovers from the enclosed photo that Ethel is white.

"I can never have her," Zachariah laments.

Instead, he entreats the light-skinned Morris to meet Ethel in his place, and they invest their joint savings in "gentleman's" clothes for the occasion. But when Morris dons the bright blue suit, the ostrich wallet, the boots, the dapper hat and the umbrella, this little play explodes with a confusion of excitement and tension between the brothers.

As they rehearse for Morris's meeting with Ethel"“ Morris dressed to the nines, Zachariah playing a peanut vendor passing by"“ the brothers become sharply aware of their differences as never before: "that special meaning and manner of whiteness…. the whiteness inside you."

Violent face-off

In the last two powerful scenes, the play suddenly turns dark, as the two brothers tear down the walls of their shanty and prepare for a violent face-off on the bare stage. Directed with an exquisite, elemental simplicity by the playwright himself, Blood Knot reveals just how deep racial hatred can go, as well as how resilient the blood knot remains.

Which element will triumph in the end— hatred or love— is yours to discover. Meanwhile, you are in the hands of a great authority on racism, humanism and the complexities of the heart. You're also in the hands of an artist who gives us an unforgettable evening in the theatre.

"We're tied together," Morris says to his brother Zachariah at one point in the play. As Beckett put it in Waiting for Godot: "All mankind is us, whether we like it or not."