'Blood Knot' tightens bonds

A co-production of Leon's True Colors Theatre and Key's Theatrical Outfit, "Blood Knot" runs July 10-Aug. 2 at downtown's Balzer Theater at Herren's.

Despite their affinity for the material, neither actor feels he's simply picking up where he left off. They have changed in the past 11 years, and so has the world.

"1998 was pre 9 / 11," Key says. "And to me, learning to get along seemed like an option then, a nice thing to do, whereas now it seems like there is more of a global consensus that it's something we've got to learn. We've got to evolve past violence."

First produced in 1961, at the the height of South Africa's brutal apartheid regime, "Blood Knot" describes a system in which skin tone is a crucial political and economic indicator. The brothers share the same black mother, but while Morris has been passing for years as a white man, Zack has been subjected to such soul-crippling hard labor that his feet are hardened with callouses. Fugard sets up the sibling rivalry as a metaphor for a country on the verge of cracking wide open. (Apartheid was finally abolished in 1994. )

Leon and Key had long discussed remounting the piece, but they always had scheduling conflicts. Leon explains: "I remember after the [November] election, I said to Tom, I said, 'OK, I think this is the time.' It just felt right, given what was happening in the world and how countries treated each other."

In "Blood Knot," Morris has moved in with Zach after a long period of estrangement, and the brothers' attempt to negotiate a peaceful relationship becomes a dangerous game, fraught with tension and discomfort. Yet it doesn't end in terror.

"I remember something that Fugard said," Leon says, when asked what the play means to him. "He said great theater is sitting in an audience watching two people confront life. And that's pure theater. I think this is sort of an example of what pure theater can be. It has a perfect balance of comedy and drama, and it sort of serves as a metaphor for the way we must get along in the world. ... I just think it's about how we live on the planet with each other, but it's reduced down to two people."

'Just a text and

two actors'

It's the afternoon after the fourth day of rehearsal for "Blood Knot," and the actors and director are sitting around a table in an Alliance rehearsal room discussing the experience. Like Morris and Zack, they have had to negotiate their place in the hierarchy. Outside this room, they operate as figureheads of their own theaters, representing three distinctive visions and personalities.

So how does this work?

Booth: "Everybody takes all their other hats off. I didn't know if I could expect that. It's just a text and two actors, and we do our work."

Key: "We never come in and say, 'Well, the way we did it before Susan' ... "

Leon: "It's like I can go home and study something and Tom can go home and study. And we come in here and we do something, and then Susan gives us one note and it becomes something that neither one of us had."

During the interview, Key comes across as the talker; he accesses his emotions easily. Booth is a bit quieter, the thinker and analyzer. Leon, who used to run the Alliance and now runs True Colors Theatre and directs on Broadway, is the class cut-up.

Leon says he can't remember the lines or the movement from the 1998 production, directed by David H. Bell. Booth stops him to point out how naturally he just rolled to the floor during a fight scene. Must have been some kind of muscle memory; she didn't choreograph it. But she likes it. "I'm going to take total credit for that," she jokes.

Though Booth has directed Key a couple of times, she's never directed Leon, who preceded her as artistic director of the Alliance. Key performs regularly, but Leon hasn't been onstage since 2004, when he appeared in the world premiere of August Wilson's "Gem of the Ocean" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.

"Getting back on the bicycle this time," Leon says, "It's like, 'Oooooh, it's harder to learn those lines. Oh, I gotta go to my speech class so I can get my mouth some muscles to move.' But the part that doesn't go away is the instinct for acting, the trust, the trying to force yourself to be in the moment."

Building trust

Not everything that happens in the rehearsal room is about process. No matter how talented or well-adjusted, each player brings his own emotional freight. It takes time to build trust.

Key shares how his friendship with Leon has evolved over time.

Growing up in segregated Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s, he remembers being ashamed and devastated that people from his church were responsible for bombs that killed black kids in their churches. Later, after his parents wouldn't let him bring a black friend home for Thanksgiving, he had to drop out of college.

So by the time he got to Atlanta, he felt pretty enlightened on matters of race.

Before 1998's "Blood Knot," he and Leon had shared the stage a couple of times. But there was something about the raw immediacy of the Fugard text that he found "very exciting and very scary."

"There was one day in rehearsal when I said something like, 'Well, you know how black people talk,' and I heard this sound in Kenny's voice like I had never heard. And he said, 'What do you mean, like black people talk?' And I felt real naked and exposed," he remembers.

But over time, their friendship has only deepened.

"I feel like I'm starting on third base with Kenny," Key says of "Blood Knot," Part 2. "It really has been a gift, our friendship. .... It's just been transformative. And then that's modeled in the play."

At the end of Fugard's story, Morris and Zack find they can't live apart. "You see, we're tied together," Morris says. "It's what they call the blood knot ... the bond between brothers."