Hard questions about race in APT's 'Blood Knot' compounded by casting decision

Just before intermission in Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” which American Players Theatre opened over the weekend in Spring Green under Ron OJ Parson’s direction, two black brothers relive a childhood fantasy.

Trapped as adults living in a one-room shack in apartheid South Africa, they indulge the illusion of freedom and flight in the car they’ve never had.  Leaving Port Elizabeth behind, they dream of  driving into the country and finding themselves surrounded by butterflies – a symbol throughout the play of miraculous transformation into something “different” and “beautiful.”

It’s a dream endlessly deferred during this sometimes meandering and emotionally exhausting three-hour tour, through a world where racial hatred continually trumps love, even between the brothers themselves.

For while Morris and Zachariah are both black, Morris is light enough to pass as white.  And for all he tries to love and serve the hard-working Zachariah – whose menial job as a gatekeeper makes him the breadwinner – neither Morris nor his dark-skinned brother can escape the allure that whiteness confers in a country where white equals might and right.

The tipping point – destroying the brothers’ illusory equality and so much else – involves the intersection of sex and power.  With Morris writing the letters, an illiterate Zachariah takes a woman as pen pal, only to learn that she’s white. 

The prospect of a relationship with a white girl titillates him – until she announces her intent to actually visit. Zachariah then begs his light-skinned brother to take his place, in a world where “a dark-born boy playing with a white idea” can mean prison.

Play-acting their parts as white and black, the brothers repeat and reinforce the ideology they’d hoped to transcend, culminating in a devastating final scene suggesting that even ties of blood can’t undo the knotty problem of race.

Gavin Lawrence’s Zachariah registers the consequent cost as early as the play’s opening scene, during which one already senses the resentment and seething anger he feels toward the light-skinned brother he’ll later describe as a “burden.” 

Sure, Morris begins by kneeling before him, preparing a foot bath for Zachariah’s aching feet and then serving him dinner.  But even in these opening minutes, it’s Morris who is scripting the brothers’ play.  Armed with his Bible and ruled by an alarm clock that divides the brothers’ days into strictly regimented increments, Morris determines how Zachariah’s money will be spent and what dreams the brothers can have.

Little wonder that Zachariah rebels in ways large and small, reflecting the passive-aggressive rage of a man often forced to be furtive about what he feels.  When Zachariah can let out the throttle – in a wrenching late soliloquy and in those excruciating moments during which long-deferred dreams finally explode – it drives home what he’d told Morris early on: “I’m a man.”

Even before asking Parson to direct, APT had decided to cast Jim DeVita – who is white – as the light-skinned Morris. APT’s choice had history on its side; white actors have been playing Morris going all the way back to Fugard’s own appearance in this role during the original 1961 production in South Africa.

But this is 2018 in the United States, in the midst of a vigorous debate within the theater community about the ramifications of continuing to cast white actors in non-white roles.  And as Parson himself noted to me in an interview during rehearsals, the fact that something’s always been done in a certain way provides little justification in and of itself for staying the course.

I have much more to say about this thorny topic in my program notes below.  Suffice it to say here that exceptional an actor as DeVita is, casting a white actor like him as Morris is a distraction, long before DeVita first unleashes the “n word” toward play’s end.

Morris tells us repeatedly that among the reasons he’s failed to pass as white is because he doesn’t truly feel white.  And one of the reasons Morris hates the brother he also loves is because Zachariah’s very existence reminds him that he himself is actually black. 

Morris admits that he understands Zachariah’s self-loathing because he feels it himself, even as he fantasizes transcending his history and becoming white. Morris’ tragedy is that he’s isolated from both the black world into which he was born and the white one he can’t comfortably inhabit. 

No white actor can capture that existential dilemma as well as a black actor can; worse, a white actor hurling racial epithets at a black character in this context necessarily distorts the much more conflicted and fraught relations in the play between two black men.

Parson, who is black, told me that a white director wouldn’t see things in this play that he himself can see as a black man; unless one experiences what it means to be black in one’s own life, how can one understand what it means to be a character like Morris? 

So stipulated. But that goes double for DeVita playing this part. As Morris rightly says, there’s “no whitewashing away a man’s facts. They’ll speak for themselves at first sight.”   

Even in DeVita’s best moments on stage in this play – and an actor this good invariably has some – I couldn’t get past the knowledge that I was watching a white man playing a black man, in a country (ours) where that sort of appropriation has a long and troubled history.  APT would never cast DeVita as a black man in an August Wilson play. It shouldn’t have cast him as a black man in this one. 

APT performs "Blood Knot" through Sept. 28 in Spring Green.

PROGRAM NOTES

What did Fugard Say?  As noted above, Fugard himself played Morris in the original 1961 production of “Blood Knot,” alongside legendary black actor Zakes Mokae (the two men reprised their roles on Broadway in 1986).  Fugard has also played other black characters in his plays, and he has directed productions of “Blood Knot” as recently as 2012 in which Morris, keeping with longstanding tradition, was played by a white actor. 

In the world of 1961 South Africa, where a white man and a black man had never before appeared together on a public stage, Fugard’s embodiment of Morris took on an entirely different and more subversive meaning (the play was eventually banned there, while interracial casts and audiences were outlawed; a 1967 BBC production of “Blood Knot” cost Fugard his passport).  But that was nearly 60 years ago, in one of the most noxious and racially repressive regimes in modern history.

To his credit, DeVita himself recognized the difference between then and now; harboring his own doubts about playing Morris, he wrote Fugard for guidance. Fugard responded by blessing DeVita playing Morris while acknowledging that the issue is complicated. That’s as much as I can tell you about this exchange; having initially suggested it might be shared with me, APT decided on reflection that it was private and shouldn’t be disclosed, especially without Fugard’s permission.

Having also initially urged me to talk to DeVita himself about the Fugard correspondence, APT also ultimately concluded that it would be unfair to ask DeVita to comment on his own casting as Morris while he was in rehearsal as Morris. DeVita himself also felt it would be more appropriate for Parson, as director, to talk about casting choices (even though, as noted above, Parson did not in fact cast this play; APT did that before Parson was involved).

Hopefully, the Fugard correspondence will be made public at some point.  DeVita is not only a brilliant actor but also a smart, thoughtful and sensitive man; so is Fugard.  Neither man would ever take an issue like this lightly.  On a topic this important – in relation to a high-profile production at the country’s best classical theater company and involving an all-star director and cast – their perspective can only enrich a discussion that needs to happen and keep happening, in a country that doesn’t talk nearly enough or with enough honesty about race.

I asked APT marketing content manager Jessica Amend whether APT itself intended to address this issue, which APT admitted it knew was going to arise in advance of me raising questions.  Amend acknowledged that artistic director Brenda DeVita has been discussing this topic with artists and patrons as it’s arisen, adding that APT has not yet discussed it publicly (it also isn’t addressed by Parson in his director’s note).  Amend also noted that APT would likely address the issue in blog or video form at some point, but that plans had not yet been finalized.

Really, APT should do much more, sponsoring a forum in which this topic might receive the sort of smart, thoughtful and honest discussion that it deserves – and that has been a hallmark of Brenda DeVita’s inspiring and game-changing efforts to ensure that APT lives up to its name as an American theater, representative of this country’s many voices.  I have spilt a lot of ink praising Brenda DeVita’s leadership at APT, on matters involving diversity and so much else.  All of it is richly deserved.  All of it points to APT playing a major role in advancing the discussion of this vital issue.

The Political and the Allegorical: In defending APT’s casting decision to me, Brenda DeVita noted that the play isn’t a literal depiction of 1960s South Africa but an allegorical meditation on brotherhood; Parson said much the same thing during our interview.  It’s true that Fugard himself states, in his published notebooks, that the inspiration for the play was his own relationship with his white brother; it’s also true that the play is heavily influenced by existential plays and writings by Beckett (especially “Waiting for Godot”) and Camus. “The image that generated ‘Blood Knot,’ Fugard said in a 1989 Paris Review interview, “had absolutely nothing to do with the racial situation in South Africa . . . I was trying to examine a guilt more profound than racial guilt – the existential guilt that I feel when another person suffers, is victimized, and I can do nothing about it.”

But Fugard also notes in the same interview that it was “South Africa [that] afforded me the most perfect device for examining this guilt” and that all of his plays “represent a coincidence between an external and an internal event” – with the external event, in this case, being the racist South African reality in which the play is set.  “Blood Knot” was, after all, also inspired by and written as a direct response to the March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which white South African security forces murdered 69 people during a protest against South Africa’s “pass laws,” an internal passport system designed to regulate and restrict movement of black South Africans.  There were nearly 300 casualties, including 29 children, at Sharpeville.

The bottom line is that Fugard chose to set his existential story in a specific South African context, in which the brothers are black rather than white, restricted from interacting with whites, subject to racist discrimination in the workplace, and continually threatened with incarceration.  All of this – as well as the way race poisons the relation between blood brothers – is baked into his play; the opening performance at APT made clear that Parson is much too good a director to ignore it.  Call the play allegorical all one wants.  It’s also viscerally political, in ways that directly involve race.  Yes, it’s a play about brothers – black brothers, whose love for each other and sense of self have been warped by racism, as practiced in a specific place and time.

Tradition: As noted above, “Blood Knot” has consistently used white actors to play Morris, going all the way back to its first performance.  Even as he tried to defend the APT casting decision he inherited as a director, Parson – refreshingly candid during our interview – had little use for this argument, and he’s right.  Referring to some of his own trailblazing multiracial casting as a director, Parson noted that such an argument about tradition could also be used to argue against any change in past casting patterns; taken to its logical extreme, such an argument would mean actors of color couldn’t ever embody Shakespearean characters, at APT or anywhere else. Such an argument could be used to defend blackface.  Such an argument was once used to defend slavery.

Parson admitted that he thought long and hard about directing this piece because of how it was cast; Brenda DeVita, who has done so much as APT artistic director to champion a more inclusive environment for artists of color, actively encouraged such reflection. Parson noted that he was won over by the prestige of APT and the prospect of a challenge. But Parson also admitted that while he loves Jim DeVita’s work as an actor, he might well have cast “Blood Knot” differently if he were starting from scratch, adding that there are indeed black actors who could have played this part and that an open casting call might have yielded one. True: under Actors Equity rules, APT could not have specifically advertised for a black actor, any more than it could in casting an August Wilson play; it is nevertheless free to make actual casting decisions driven by aesthetic and political considerations involving age, race and gender. It’s no accident that nearly all the actors in “Hamilton” are actors of color, and it would be bizarre to cast it any other way.

Transformation: Speaking of those Equity rules: One might well argue in defense of APT’s casting decision that theater is supposed to be transformative; actors regularly inhabit selves different from their own, challenging all of us to expand our sense of who we might be. Viewed this way, DeVita should be as free to play a black man like Morris as he is to play a soldier like Iago (indeed, DeVita’s performance in “Blood Knot” taps the same combination of self-hatred, rage and racism here that fueled his terrific Iago in APT’s 2004 production of “Othello”). 

But nontraditional casting doesn’t mean color blind casting and doesn’t mean anything goes; that’s why there was a justifiable outcry in 2015 when college productions cast white actors as South Asians in a production of Lloyd Suh’s “Jesus in India” and a white actor as Martin Luther King in Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop.”

In an ensuing statement issued by American Theatre Magazine and the Theater Communication Group – subsequently signed by more than 1,300 theater artists – TCG endorsed as a “principle” “the importance of ending the harmful practice of white actors playing characters of color.”  “While theatre has always been a place for transformation,” the statement continued, “we must also acknowledge the past oppressions and ongoing inequities facing people of color, including an uneven playing field where the vast majority of opportunities, onstage and off, are held by whites.”  In a 2017 study, Actors Equity noted that white men already hold a grossly disproportionate share of acting and stage management contracts.  No matter how well-intentioned, casting white men as black characters doesn’t address that problem.  It compounds it.

Who is “Blood Knot” For?  In a revealing letter about the three so-called Port Elizabeth plays – including “Blood Knot” – Fugard described them as a protest “against the conspiracy of silence about how the next man lives and what happens to groups other than our own” (emphasis added).  That last phrase suggests a play – true of so many Fugard plays – that’s clearly been written by a white liberal speaking primarily to other white liberals, involving the paralyzing guilt they feel about the privilege they enjoy in a world from which they benefit even as they decry its abuses.  One of this past century’s greatest theater critics called this out as early as 1963, after reviewing the first production of “Blood Knot” in Britain.  However well it addresses white liberal guilt, Kenneth Tynan noted, “Blood Knot” will seem “drably unadventurous” “to people who would not be horrified if their daughter married a negro [sic].”

It’s a credit to Parson and the terrific Lawrence that Zachariah’s voice is so vividly realized in this production.  But for all its undeniable historical importance, “Blood Knot” remains a sometimes tedious and ultimately conservative play that travels in circles while focusing on white guilt and dystopian white nightmares of black revolt and revenge.  It imagines South Africa as an imprisoning room with no exit, even as it concludes with the message that nothing will ever change (rendering both jarring and false the decision to end the APT production by invoking the stirring anthem of the African National Congress).  There’s none of the transformative energy, here, that I experienced last summer in watching APT’s galvanizing production of “The Maids,” an ostensibly similar play about the roles we play and what they can teach us about hierarchies of race, class and gender (as well as the possibility of subverting the same).  There is no such transformation in “Blood Knot,” either on the page or on the APT stage.