TT: Waiting for Mandela

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a review of Signature Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Blood Knot. Here’s an excerpt.
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Audiences in New York haven’t been able to see much of the work of Athol Fugard, South Africa’s greatest playwright, in recent years, but his stock is now taking a sharp leap upward. In addition to the Roundabout Theatre Company’s current Broadway revival of “The Road to Mecca,” Signature Theatre is mounting three Fugard productions this season, the first of which, “Blood Knot,” has been directed by the author himself. That alone is reason to go, since “Blood Knot,” the 1961 two-man play that introduced Mr. Fugard to the world’s stages, is a modern classic, a play that moves with stealthy sureness from a quiet, almost nonchalant start to an overwhelming conclusion. To see what Mr. Fugard has done with it would be a must even if his staging were less effective–and he has done exactly right by “Blood Knot.” If you don’t find this revival enthralling, you’re not thrillable.
Mr. Fugard’s two characters, Zach (Colman Domingo) and Morris (Scott Shepherd), live together in a pathetic-looking one-room shack built out of cardboard boxes and corrugated iron. Zach is dark-skinned, Morris light-skinned, and if you were to see them walking down the street, you’d never guess that they were related, much less that they are half-brothers. Cut off from the world by poverty, they spend their free time playing out child-like fantasies together. It is this penchant for fantasy that inspires Morris to find a female pen-pal for his illiterate brother, who longs in vain for a real live girl (Zach dictates his letters to Morris, who polishes up his grammar, then reads the replies to him). What starts out as a gentle working-class variation on “The Shop Around the Corner” then turns deadly serious when Ethel, Zach’s correspondent, suggests that they meet, enclosing a snapshot which reveals that she is white.
Mr. Fugard could have developed this promising scenario in any number of conventionally “effective” ways. Instead, taking Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” as his point of departure, he has sketched the plight of his characters plight in a way that is partly comic and partly surreal….
The verdict of posterity has yet to be handed down on the rest of Mr. Fugard’s oeuvre, but judging by this revival, I’d say that “Blood Knot” will remain fresh for some time to come. The reason for its freshness is that Mr. Fugard, though he leaves you in no doubt of the play’s political implications, embeds them in poetic symbolism rather than stooping to the kind of explicit sermonizing that kills so many political plays stone dead.
Mr. Fugard has staged “Blood Knot” with a similarly light touch, emphasizing the play’s slapstick physicality and allowing its sweetness free rein. Messrs. Domingo and and Shepherd are no less alive to the comedy of “Blood Knot,” so much so that they reminded me at times of Laurel and Hardy….
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Read the whole thing here.