Theater: In the Prison of Color

The Blood Knot, by Atholl Fugard, links two South African half-brothers in a fierce, funny, tender, scalding love-hate relationship. Though both are sons of the same dark-skinned mother, one brother is white and the other is dark.

They live in a tin shack in the colored ghetto outside Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The white brother, Morris (J.D. Cannon), an intense, broody, mothering sort, keeps house for the pair. The black brother, Zachariah (James Earl Jones), is one of nature's children, open-faced and openhanded. He tends a park gate where he shoos away any colored child who tries to enter. Every night Morris readies a ritualistic footbath for Zach's raw, swollen feet. But in the realm of color, skin-deep is heartdeep and there is no balm for those abrasions.

Morris speaks feelingly of brotherhood, but what he practices is more like Big Brotherhood, the slightly proprietary snobbism of a global planner confined to one squalid room and one underdeveloped mentality. He is a demon of uplift ("talking helps") and tries to tempt Zach's palate with a wedge of pie in the sky—a farm the two brothers will buy and work. But Zach, a man of profound instinctual sanity, is slow to sublimate. "I'm sick of talking, man, I want a woman," he says. Morris fobs him off with a pen pal ("18 years old and well-developed") to whom Morris will write. When the girl, who is white, promises to appear, each brother panics for opposing reasons. Zach yearns for the girl, but he dares not violate the racial taboo, and must violate his feelings instead. Morris is tempted to meet the girl, except that he has passed for white before and knows the self-loathing he felt at the ugly pleasure of renouncing the black within him, and spurning the blacks around him.

In a full-length two-character play, each actor has to be at least an actor and a half. Both J. D. Cannon and James Earl Jones are enormously skillful. At first Cannon seems considerate, practical, matter-of-fact, and then his nerves start to sing like high-tension wires. The playgoer senses that he is watching a man hiding from the beast in himself. James Earl Jones can be as quiet as an extinct volcano one moment, and spewing emotional lava across a stage the next. With some actors, words clothe feelings; with Jones, feelings unclothe words so that joy, rage, wonder and sadness radiate nakedly through the theater.

An off-Broadway production, Blood Knot sometimes echoes with echoes, and speaks in the voices of Genet, Pinter, and even the John Steinbeck of Of Mice and Men. But Atholl Fugard, a white South African, shuns preachments and never oversimplifies the human equation. His symbols are the kind that laugh, cry and bleed.