From Skin to Soul

Jodie's Body and The Blood Knot enmeshed the audience in the lives of three South Africans

From October to December of 1999 the Sacramento Theater Company brought us a pithy one act monologue, Jodie's Body, written by and starring (for most of its extended local run) Aviva Jane Carlin. In December the Celebration Arts Theatre brought us Athol Fugard's full length two-character play, The Blood Knot. Both plays carried us under the skin of their three apartheid-reared South Africans into the core of their beings.

Jodie is a bountifully bodied artist's model whose struggle for peace with her plumpness in a world that worships thinness is a metaphor for the much more perilous struggles her black friends had in a white-worshipping society. Jodie's Body is a beautifully evolving stream of free-associations for the most part delivered in the nude.

Jodie quickly transports the audience past the nudity, the skin and the body, into the heart and soul of a woman who has faced her self-loathing about her body and apartheid with an unpretentious honesty that now transcends, but does not forget, the pain.

It takes longer to get from skin to innards in The Blood Knot, but the trip is gripping theater. Fugard requires his actors to use movement as much as speech to undress and expose themselves. James Anderson is the white brother, Morris, who has returned to his non-white hovel of a home to redeem himself by taking over his black brother's life. Morris is ritualistically compulsive, literally on a timer, as he anticipates his brother's every need, and a few needs his brother never thought of.

James Wheatley as the black brother, Zachariah, rocks rhythmically like an anxiously autistic child or a weary, praying Jew. He is tired and bent, debased by the yoke of apartheid, except when he escapes for moments into excited atavistic fantasies and rhythms. We care about this odd-couple, these brothers who reveal so much about what lies under their different skin colors, the hatreds and longings within their blood knot.

Both plays enmesh their audiences; staging them in very small theaters, as was done in Sacramento, heightens the audience's emotional entanglement. This theatrical intimacy has characterized most of the Sacramento Theater Company's Stage One productions, especially since Peggy Shannon has been artistic director.

It is essential in the work of the Celebration Arts Theatre, whose enormously energetic, talented and inspiring artistic director, Myrtle Stephens, has created a repertory family of enthusiastic and devoted co-celebrants of the arts. Their song, dance, and acting blossoms in intimate theater.

To show how seriously Myrtle Stephens celebrates the arts, she will have Bob Devin Jones, who so masterfully directed The Blood Knot, back in May to direct Fugard's Sizwe Bansi.

Ed_Rudin@macnexus.org