Theater Review : ‘Knot’ Isn’t Undone by Ties to Past : Fugard Work Transcends Changes in South Africa

ORANGE — South African President Nelson Mandela has new worries. Apartheid is gone, but street gangs and petty crime and an estimated 50% unemployment rate are national migraine headaches. Blacks are now equal-opportunity voters, and also equal-opportunity crime victims. It isn’t the South Africa of yesterday.

It also may not be Athol Fugard’s South Africa, either. The country’s premiere playwriting voice has always resisted the boundaries of “apartheid drama” (taken as a whole, Fugard’s oeuvre is perhaps the most universal political drama library of the century). But his plays’ conflicts have always resided within South Africa’s formerly stunted social system.

Now comes the word of a new, more visual, less naturalistic South African theater supplanting the poetic, humanistic Fugard style. Is his time gone?

One possibly interesting answer is at the Ensemble Theatre, where a very early (1961) Fugard work, “Blood Knot,” is being revived in Roosevelt Blankenship Jr.’s appropriately bare staging.

Blankenship does double duty as Morrie, the educated and lighter-skinned black brother of Zachariah (Mellow Martin), whose blistering feet are the most obvious wounds of his wretched life as an open-air laborer in Port Elizabeth.

All that Zach can think of is getting a woman and mulling over the past. Morrie’s eyes, though, are fixed on the future, securing a farm that he and Zach can operate. That dream is diverted by another idea of Morrie’s: Setting up Zach with a female pen pal, thus teaching him how to write and letting him feel close to a woman, even at long distance.

As with all Fugard heroes and their hopes, things don’t turn out as planned. In Fugard’s world, the educated rule, so Morrie soon takes over the pen-pal correspondence from Zach. But the prospect of the female pen pal actually visiting them (she’s white, young, and “well-developed”) completely shatters the long-distance fantasy.

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“Blood Knot” was Fugard’s first partial mastery of finding a theatrical metaphor for apartheid--the apartness of the letter writers, the apartness of brothers by differing shades of black skin. The mastery of poetic dialogue wasn’t there yet, and a crudely abrupt ending awkwardly quoting the play’s title betrays this as early Fugard.

The same pair of actors performed Fugard’s “The Island” at the Ensemble two years ago, so it must have made sense to tackle another of his two-character dramas. It’s a decision, though, that critically robs us of seeing the skin-shade problem. Blankenship is only moderately lighter-skinned than Martin. To make the point about skin-color difference, Fugard, who is white, cast himself as Morrie opposite black actor Zakes Mokae’s in previous “Blood Knot” productions.

The physical contrast drives Zach to wonder aloud at one point if they have the same mother. With that contrast gone, Blankenship and Martin rely on behavior, and here we see some good acting.

The sinewy Martin speaks in rising and falling musical tones, but with a quiet ache underneath it all. He allows Zach’s eventual hurt to emerge slowly, like water forcing itself through rock.

Blankenship lacks Martin’s subtlety, but his is also the pedantic role. Morrie sees himself as spurring people on, while noting injustice wherever it exists, and Blankenship suggests his impatience at the slowness of society’s change.

Now, of course, it has all changed. But Morrie, as written by Fugard, isn’t an anachronism. The extremely bare and dingy shack the brothers share (modestly designed by Blankenship) could be almost anywhere poor people live, and “Blood Knot’s” brothers are the kind of archetypes that lift them above newspaper accounts and issues of the moment.

* “Blood Knot,” Ensemble Theatre, 844 E. Lincoln Ave., Suite E, Orange. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. Resumes Aug. 10-12. $12-$15. (714) 998-2670. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

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Roosevelt Blankenship: Jr. Morrie

Mellow Martin: Zachariah

An Eastern Boys production of Athol Fugard’s play. Direction and set: Blankenship. Lights and sound: Marcus E. Blankenship.