American Conservatory Theatre Tackles Big Issues In Fugard's Blood Knot

Featuring stirring original music composed for this production by internationally renowned, multiple Grammy Awardwinning artist Tracy Chapman, Fugard's 1961 classic of race, politics, and brotherhood plays at the American Conservatory Theater February 8 through March 9, with press night February 13.

Set in the South Africa of the early 1960s, Blood Knot follows two brothers living together in penury in a township outside of Port Elizabeth. The two lead an apparently stable life, as Morrie, who can pass for white, cooks and cleans for himself and hardworking, dark-skinned Zach, until the two take up a pen pal. When a snapshot reveals that the pen pal is a white woman, tensions between the brothers seethe to the surface and explode, revealing truths about the characters, about race, and about the nature of brotherhood the world over. Says A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff, "I wish I could claim that over a year ago when we programmed this extraordinary play about race and family, we guessed that a sea change would be happening in American politics and that this presidential campaign would be dominated by a major biracial candidate. The actual origin of this particular production was somewhat closer to home: when we invited Jack Willis to join A.C.T.'s core acting company last year, I asked him to give
me a list of the plays he would most like to explore. At the top of his list was Blood Knot, with Steven Anthony Jones."

In an exclusive A.C.T. interview, featured in A.C.T.'s Words on Plays, Fugard himself discusses the genesis of the piece: "It was during my few years at the University of Cape Town. I had hitchhiked back to my hometown to spend the Christmas holidays with my family, my mother and father, and I knew that my brother, who had been away from home for some time, and whom I hadn't seen for quite a few years, would also be there. I arrived late at night, and my mother let me into the darkened, everybody's-still-sleeping house, and in whispers we moved to the bedroom that I always shared with my brother. And I could see my mother was a little disturbed, and when she held out the candle so I could see my brother, I saw that he had suffered a lot during those few years. The pain, even in that sleeping face in repose, pain was written very, very powerfully on his face. What I had remembered as a powerful, broad-shouldered man who I had always been a little jealous of because of his physical prowess and good looks, I saw
somebody who had really taken some hard knocks. That is actually embodied in that monologue that Morrie has at the end of the first scene when Zach has fallen asleep."

"Blood enables you to cross boundaries, to be inappropriate, to step on toes, to go much further than you automatically would as a regular person who has compassion and consideration," says director Randolph-Wright. At the same time, Randolph-Wright intends for the play to open discussions on important issues of politics, society, and family. "I really want this play to make us have a conversation about race and identity that we don't have in this country anymore," he says. "We don't think we need this conversation, we think it's been done. But when you realize that San Francisco is less than 10 percent black, then I think you realize you need to talk about these things. To me, coming to this play is a conversation." -- www.act-sf.org