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February 16, 2012

THEATER REVIEW

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

The bond of brotherhood proves as thorny as it is unbreakable in Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” set in a dingy shack in South Africa in 1961, when apartheid still held the country firmly in its strangling grip. The Signature Theater Company inaugurates its new theater complex with a revival of Mr. Fugard’s multilayered two-hander that opened on Thursday night, directed by the playwright and starring Colman Domingo and Scott Shepherd as brothers divided by skin color but bound together by both pernicious social forces and the mysterious ties of blood.

First, a word about the Frank Gehry-designed Pershing Square Signature Center, as the light-filled, handsome and spacious new complex on 42nd Street at 10th Avenue is called. Containing three theaters and a cafe and bar, it is a spectacular shot in the arm for this worthy company, whose focus since its inception in 1991 has been celebrating the canon of American drama, usually with seasons devoted to the work of a single playwright.

The Signature’s mandate is expanding with its elegant though unpretentious new accommodations: “Blood Knot” is the first play by a non-American the company has presented. (Two more Fugard works are planned for later in the season.) It will be followed in short order by a return to domestic territory: “Hurt Village,” a play by Katori Hall (“The Mountaintop”) that opens at the end of February, and a revival of Edward Albee’s rarely seen “Lady from Dubuque,” starring Jane Alexander and opening in early March.

Here’s where I would like to report that “Blood Knot” kicks the company’s landmark season off to a thrilling start. The truth is more complicated: Mr. Domingo and Mr. Shepherd are both gifted actors — Mr. Domingo was a Tony nominee for “The Scottsboro Boys” this year, and Mr. Shepherd was the captivating, still center of “Gatz” — and Mr. Fugard’s play brings to life the thankfully distant brutalities of apartheid with the piercing humanity that distinguishes all his finest work.

And yet the production is more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging. On the surface the performances are impeccable, but a crucial spark of authentic feeling remains stubbornly absent. Neither Mr. Shepherd nor Mr. Domingo has, as yet, fully realized these complex characters and the dynamics of their relationship.

Admittedly, their bond is a tortured one. The play opens a year after Morris (Mr. Shepherd) has returned to the impoverished “colored” neighborhood where he and his brother Zachariah (Mr. Domingo) grew up. Although they take for granted their brotherhood — at least at first — the men had different fathers, and Morris’s much lighter skin color has given him the liberty to pry apart the prison bars of apartheid and “pass” for a white South African.

And yet after many years away Morris has been ineluctably drawn back to the shack where Zachariah has long lived and now dotes on his brother with an almost maternal devotion, tending to their daily rituals — Zachariah’s post-work foot bath, the humble dinner, the reading of the Bible before bed — with obsessive care perhaps touched by contrition. Morris has also hatched a plan for them to escape the despair of their cramped lives by purchasing a small farm with the money Zachariah makes doing menial work.

This idyllic vision is threatened when Zachariah expresses boredom and a longing for the company of a woman. The flustered Morris suggests that he acquire a female pen pal, and Zachariah duly begins corresponding with a “well-developed” 18-year-old woman, with the necessary help of Morris, who unlike Zachariah can read and write.

Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Domingo, in roles originated by Mr. Fugard and Zakes Mokae, the great South African actor, in both the original production and the revised version from 1985seen on Broadway, are at their best in accentuating the comical rapport between the brothers as they hatch this plan and set it in motion. The tired squint in Zachariah’s eyes brightens to a glow — with a hint of a leer — as he warms to the idea, while Mr. Shepherd is amusingly pedantic as Morris patiently explains how the formalities of letter writing diverge from Zachariah’s ideas about courting women. Wonderful too is the ebullient scene in which the brothers indulge in a playful return to a childhood game of make-believe.

Both actors are less adept, I’m afraid, in bringing alive the unruly feelings that begin to simmer under the surface of their amiable if sometimes fractious relationship when they make a startling discovery: Zachariah’s new pen pal, Miss Ethel Lange, is a white woman.

That it takes both brothers more than one look at her picture to register this fact might at first seem incredible. But as “Blood Knot” makes woundingly clear, they both have so internalized the divisions between white and black in South Africa that it is almost inconceivable that Zachariah could have any intimate contact whatsoever with a white woman, even through the medium of the mail.

Morris’s suggestion that they burn her letter is greeted by Zachariah at first with a playful rebuff, to be followed by a truculent resistance. Morris’s insistence that even written correspondence between a black man and a white woman is impossible awakens in his brother a new and eventually agonizing sense of his own exclusion from full humanity in the country’s racist culture.

But both the terror that grips Morris and the seething sense of anger growing in Zachariah’s heart don’t register very strongly. Mr. Shepherd doesn’t quite capture the febrile sensitivity and protectiveness of Morris, nor the desperate sorrow he feels when he realizes that Zachariah is determined to destroy his dream of their happy future together. Nor does Mr. Domingo illuminate with sufficient ferocity how Zachariah’s new awareness of the difference between him and his brother — the mere fact of skin color — inspires him to draw Morris into another game of make-believe, this time far more dangerous and potentially destructive.

The final scene of “Blood Knot” depicts with a combination of surreal humor and harrowing cruelty how deeply the poison of apartheid has entered their spirits. While the play is firmly naturalistic in its details, Mr. Fugard was clearly writing under the influence of Samuel Beckett, and in this staging he emphasizes the affinity in this culminating scene. As the men begin to enact a ritual by turns playful and vicious, retreating from the abyss just in time, the squalidly atmospheric stage design of Christopher H. Barreca is torn asunder, leaving Zachariah and Morris on the barren platform that constitutes a stage.

While both the Beckettian dimensions and the layers of meaning register with a certain force, it is possible, unfortunately, to watch the devastating climax of “Blood Knot” without feeling it gnaw at your insides. As the lights dim on the brothers facing a vacant future, bound in a relationship now potentially tainted by all that has passed, the heart remains cool because the performance never truly plumbs the play’s anguished depths.

Blood Knot

Written and directed by Athol Fugard; sets by Christopher H. Barreca; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Stephen Strawbridge; sound by Brett Jarvis; music by Doug Wieselma; dialect coach, Barbara Rubin; fight director, Rick Sordelet; production stage manager, Pamela Salling; associate artistic director, Beth Whitaker; general manager, Adam Bernstein; director of production, Paul Ziemer. Presented by the Signature Theater, James Houghton, founding artistic director; Erika Mallin, executive director. At the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater, 480 West 42nd Street, Clinton;             (212) 244-7529      ; signaturetheatre.org. Through March 11. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Colman Domingo (Zachariah) and Scott Shepherd (Morris).

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