Blood and Money
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Blood and Money The interior of a rusting, corrugated-iron shack, set in a South African slum, provides the stage boundaries for The Blood Knot (Cricket Theater,...
...and move after move in the game of who "really loves" whom...
...Morris is content to fend off the present for the sake of a picturesque future...
...mild strictures on current fads...
...Morris stashes them in a can...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Blood and Money The interior of a rusting, corrugated-iron shack, set in a South African slum, provides the stage boundaries for The Blood Knot (Cricket Theater, Second Avenue...
...One such group, the Lincoln Center Company, has now come to the third and last play of its first season at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre: S. N. Behrman's But for Whom Charlie...
...wise old gentlemen...
...while James Earl Jones - bounding, quicksilvery, boyish-reveals gifts for high and broad comedy, and so takes stock of both Zachariah's shrewdness and his illiteracy...
...But this is not all The Blood Knot offers...
...phone calls...
...heroines who shock people who are easily shocked...
...The most conspicuous, and used, property on stage is a teakwood bar designed by Jo Mielziner and inhabited, so to speak, by Ralph Meeker as the manager of the foundation...
...Only Wayne, as an aging author, and Michael Strong, as a non-playing Broadway bassoonist, manage to make any theatrical capital out of the sluggish proceedings...
...Morris came out white, Zachariah brown...
...From then on Zachariah forces out of Morris his hidden desire to be completely a white man, if not a white boss...
...tea and harsher refreshments...
...Zachariah earns the wages...
...The rather outlandish title of Behrman's new play gave out hope that he might at least be trying for some outlandish consequences...
...And this metamorphosis gives Zachariah a motive for destroying his brother-guardianenemy...
...The play rocks along with a seesaw motion as first one, then the other, brother asserts his power...
...Zachariah wants a woman...
...J. D. Cannon has found a precise and stealthy manner for Morris, who is a compulsive arranger of objects and lives...
...Morris and Zachariah Pieterson are bastard half-brothers, born to a Negro mother and different fathers...
...The play is written by Atholl Fugard, a young South African director-actor, and by the end of the second act you are beginning to wish that it held a larger population than its two-man cast or at least held out some visual distraction...
...high-fashion gowns...
...brusque young bohemians...
...frequent exits preceded by parting lines...
...The big laughs of the evening are won by a threatening lighter flame which Jason Robards Jr., the millionaire, waves under David Wayne's nose...
...Other props in the shape of Salome Jens, Clint Kimbrough and Faye Dunaway describe constellations around this bar under Elia Kazan's unavailing direction, until the last scene settles the pairing off and the destination of some of Robard's money...
...But as soon as he does, the dry social realism of the script passes into ritual and the story quickens...
...pleas for tolerance, if not decency...
...And the actors themselves, both offBroadway dependables, are displaying their most imaginative impersonations to date...
...I suppose, all in all, that it was unreasonable to expect Behrman to lose his dramatic temper at this stage of his career, and downright futile to expect a cold inquiry into private philanthropy from Lincoln Center, an organization that was heavily financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, Guggenheim and other foundations...
...maids...
...Zachariah would like to live it up...
...It takes too long to reach the moment when Morris dons an expensive, white man's suit...
...Morris wants a farm...
...Alas, Behrman pays yet another visit to the tempo and dialogue of his Biography, Rain from Heaven, End of Summer, and those other 1930-ish products with the paraphanalia but not the tartness of Somerset Maugham...
...Morris, who escaped for a time from this shantytown on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, has now returned to play his brother's housekeeper...
...Together Berry, Cannon and Jones deliver a lesson in stage reciprocity that several of the repertory groups in town might usefully study...
...Thus the play grows late but grows large...
...Some of the resources of Behrman's theater are: frequent entrances followed by thorough introductions...
...and the subject of the play-the givings and misgivings of an idealistic millionaire who runs a foundationinflated the hope to a full-blown possibility...
...Zachariah, who has never been away, has had no schooling, whereas Morris can read the newspaper and scrawl pen-pal letters...
...The director, John Berry, conducts the actors with an artistry that serves the play at all points...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 7
