Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo play unlikely siblings in Signature revival of Athol Fugard’s BLOOD KNOT (photo by Gregory Costanzo)
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through March 11, $25
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org
It’s rather ironic that the Signature Theatre Company chose to open its sparkling new $66 million Frank Gehry-designed facility with a play set on a makeshift stage scattered with detritus, including rotting mattresses, sans backdrop, as if someone forgot to clean up the remaining debris from all the construction, or like a garbage barge pausing in the middle of a beautiful river. Written and directed by South African playwright and actor Athol Fugard, Blood Knot is running through March 11 at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, one of three theaters in the stunning new Signature Center on West 42nd St. Set in 1961, the year it was first produced with a single performance in Johannesburg, the two-man show features Tony nominee Colman Domingo (The Scottsboro Boys) as Zachariah and Obie winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz) as Morris, two brothers living in a dilapidated shack in the poor section of Korsten, a suburb of Port Elizabeth. Morris, who is extremely light-skinned and can pass for white, has been saving money so the two men can buy a farm someday. Meanwhile, Colman toils at a degrading job, coming home exhausted and angry, arguing over the bath salts Morris puts in the hot water in which Colman soaks his tired feet. After Colman complains about how lonely he is for a woman, Morris suggests that he find himself a female pen pal in the newspaper, but things go haywire when the white woman suddenly decides to pay a visit.
Brothers Zachariah and Morris dream of a better life in searing BLOOD KNOT (photo by Gregory Costanzo)
Blood Knot takes on apartheid without ever getting overtly political; Fugard imbues the taut drama with smart dialogue that relatively subtly lays out the inherent racism of South African society, using the two brothers’ hopes, dreams, and fears to reveal the vast separation between white and black. Shepherd is outstanding as Morris, speaking elegantly of a future they are extremely unlikely to ever experience. Domingo is big and bold as Zachariah, generally projecting too theatrically but still cutting an impressive, powerful, yet sympathetic figure, particularly in a moving soliloquy in the second act. Fugard, who has often appeared as Morris (usually opposite Zakes Mokae, including on Broadway in 1986 — J. D. Cannon and James Earl Jones played the siblings off-Broadway in 1964), directs with a smooth hand that erupts at the surprising conclusion. Blood Knot is a splendid start to the Signature’s Residency One: Athol Fugard Series, which will continue with My Children! My Africa May 1 – June 10 and The Train Driver August 14 – September 23, in addition to the current Broadway production of The Road to Mecca, a collaboration with the Roundabout. There will also be postperformance talkbacks with the cast and crew on February 23 and March 1 and a preshow discussion with one of the show’s designers on February 29. Tickets for all seats for all shows at the Signature are a mere $25, an amazing deal that should not be missed.
In the late 1970s, Andrea Callard helped found a collective of artists that would come to be known as Colab, or Collaborative Projects, Inc. Among her fellow officers in the group were Coleen Fitzgibbons, Tom Otterness, and Ulli Rimkus. “Through a juicy and conflicted multi-year period of identity and structural definition,” she explains on her website, “there was experimentation in and rich discussion of accessible content, political forces, technology, equity, corporate versus union models, and material resources.” From February 13 to 19, the Maysles Institute will look back at Callard’s career by presenting the world premiere of her first feature-length film, Talking Landscape: Early Media Work, 1974-1984, which examines all those things and more in its eighty minutes. More a greatest-hits package than a narrative nonfiction film, Talking Landscape consists of several of Callard’s low-budget, low-tech Super 8 shorts, narrated in her steady deadpan, beginning with 11 thru 12, in which Callard humorously discusses “inspiration, information, transportation, the National Geographic, the Yellow Pages, and taxi cabs” while standing at an ironing board, trying to hail a cab out on the street, and walking on her hands in the ocean. In Notes on Ailanthus, she details the history of the tree that “grows abundantly in all the empty spaces around New York.” In Sound Windows, she has fun with her apartment windows. In Walking Outside, she sings a blues song while walking through green fields. Talking Landscape also includes a trio of slide shows of site-specific installations Callard was involved in. Commuting from Point to Point combines images shot in Paris, Italy, and New York with phrases lifted from books; for example a shot of cigarettes put out in a bowl of dirt on a newspaper is accompanied by the words “only time gets lost,” while a photo of the Spanish Steps features the phrase “worn by millions of feet.” The Customs House is a document of the 1979 Creative Time group show “Custom and Culture 2,” held inside the dilapidated Customs House by Bowling Green, now home to the National Museum of the American Indian. And finally, The Times Square Show takes viewers on a tour of the seminal art show held in June 1980, which sought to investigate “the need to communicate in a larger world”; the Colab exhibition comprised works by Keith Haring, Lee Quinones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Otterness, Callard, and others held in the then-still-seedy neighborhood. Throughout the film, Callard displays a wry sense of humor in these brief experimental works that were part of a major shift in the New York City art scene. Talking Landscape is being screened as part of the Maysles Institute’s continuing “Documentary in Bloom” series, curated by Livia Bloom, who will moderate Q&As with Callard following the February 16 and 19 showings.
