Tom Story and Nathan Hinton (Stan Barouh)

Mosaic Theater’s staging of Athol Fugard’s 1961 play Blood Knot is entertaining, but decisions made in production take away from its final impact.

The show features two brothers, one dark skinned and one light, living in a shack in the colored section of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Zachariah (Nathan Hinton) is a simple man who works long hours on his feet keeping blacks away from the whites-only section of a park. After returning from a long absence, his brother Morris (Tom Story) has tended their home, cooking, cleaning, and saving money.

The brothers are saving to buy a farm, with Morris constantly talking about their future and Zachariah longing for the days when he lived alone, free to blow his paycheck on booze and women. Now, instead of going out, he stays in with his brother, reminiscing about their childhood and reading the Bible.

That nostalgia gets Zachariah in trouble. Simply put, he’s terminally horned up, so Morris suggests Zachariah get a pen pal, with Morris playing Cyrano de Bergerac for his illiterate brother. But the pen pal they settle on turns out to be a white woman—a white woman whose brother is a cop, in Apartheid-era South Africa.

The play’s first half has all the set up for a really screwed-up sitcom, with Zachariah imploring his white-passing brother to pretend to be an acceptable, Caucasian version of himself when this pen pal visits. But after intermission, this twisted version of make believe corrupts the childlike tenor of their other games, poisoning their relationship by laying bare all the issues they hold against one another and the racially divided world around them.

Blood Knot is a sharp play that blends laugh-out-loud comedy with truly discomfiting drama. It’s a distinctly regional narrative, but one whose themes travel well, given how prevalent colorism continues to be, even half a century after its original production. In that first staged version, Fugard played Morris himself, marking the show as the first interracial play performed in South Africa. Subsequent productions have followed the tradition of casting a white actor as the white-passing brother. As symbolism, this is a powerful gesture, but in practice, it only muddles the complexity between these two brothers.

Morris and Zachariah are both meant to be biracial, each born from different fathers, each falling on opposing ends of the paper bag test. But by insisting that the men be such visual opposites, the show compromises its ability to explore the way skin tone can divide family. That’s not to say Story isn’t a delight as Morris. He and Hinton have a palpable chemistry; the play lives or dies on whether or not you buy the two leads as kin, and by that metric it succeeds.

But the suspension of disbelief required to see Morris as a black man struggling to pass among white society while being shackled to his dark brother is just too much. The casting isn’t exactly black face, but it’s distracting. Joy Zinoman’s staging is compelling on a surface level, wringing maximum intensity from the play’s words and selling the claustrophobia of the brothers’ home. Still, something is missing.

As incendiary as this piece has the potential to be, as heavily as it relies on the thorny intricacies of the black experience, there’s just something off-putting about a white director staging a white playwright’s thoughts about two black brothers, one of whom is played by a white actor. In 2017, it would be more novel to explore the difficult bond between two brothers, rather than visually dividing them from the start.

Blood Knot runs at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, through April 30th. Buy tickets here.