We're all really `Blood Brothers'

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

You don't have to come to New York to see "Blood Brothers," the hit London musical about twins separated at birth, one raised with money, one raised without. The story's an old, familiar one. It has been playing for centuries in cities and towns all over the world. The chasm between the haves and the have nots has always been the Great Divide.

And the chasm is getting wider.

Still, it always comes as a shock to see how much money means, how, deprived of it, a life can be like a seed thrown on dry soil. The seed holds the potential to become a beautiful, hardy flower. But it never develops as it should, as it could, if its environment doesn't nurture it.

This is the plot of "Blood Brothers": A woman's husband walks out on her and their brood of children, leaving the woman broke and pregnant. The milkman refuses to leave milk until his bill is paid. The furniture people repossess all she owns. Her children cry because they're hungry.

The woman goes to work cleaning a rich person's house. She pays the milkman. She buys food for her kids. Working constantly, she's just managing to keep the wolf from her door.

Then she finds out she is having twins. What will she do now? How will she be able to feed two more children? The woman whose house she cleans offers a solution. Unable to have children herself, she begs for one of the babies, to raise it as her own.

No, the poor woman says. But then she goes home and listens to her children moan in their sleep because they are hungry. She knows the state will take them all if she can't provide for them. The woman feels the wolf's breath on her face.

Her employer says, "The child will have a wonderful life with me. I can give him everything that you can't." Unable to dispute this, the poor woman agrees to give away her baby.

The audience recognizes this is wrong, that the poor woman has been exploited. In movies and plays it's always easy to recognize right and wrong. In real life it's a lot more difficult. But here, for the moment, it's crystal clear that the rich woman should give the poor woman more work so she can keep her babies. The rich woman should intervene in their lives to help them, not hurt them.

But she doesn't. She takes the infant and raises him as her own. He goes to private schools, learns all the social graces and grows to his potential.

The other twin, raised in poverty, though just as bright and eager to learn, grows bitter. The audience sees that he never had a chance.

Money counts more than motherhood is the grim theme you walk away knowing. Money buys everything. You can love your child, but if you can't feed him and clothe him and raise him in a safe neighborhood and make sure he goes to a good school, he's doomed. It's as simple as that. This isn't the way things should be. But this is the way things are.

People wept leaving the theater, moved not by the plight of those acting out parts on a stage, but by the millions of real people these actors represent. The play was set in England but the pattern is so tragically predictable in this country, too. Poverty begets poverty; ignorance begets ignorance; anger leads to more anger; one violent acts leads to more violent acts. You become, not what you could be, but what you're exposed to. You grow to fit the life you live. You grow into a mold.

The luckiest kids are born to people who don't have to worry about money. Parents who live in a nice house in the nicest of towns, who can send their kids to all the best schools, read them books at night, take them to art museums and concerts and on vacation to a different country every year.

The still lucky ones get a house that's not quite so nice in a less affluent town, but they, too, have someone who reads them books and if they don't go to museums and foreign countries, they do go to the movies and on a family vacation once a year.

The unlucky ones get nothing. They're born to poor women who struggle because their husbands left them, because they have no husband and no education, because they're strung out on alcohol and drugs. These children aren't read to or taken anywhere. They grow up on their own, on the streets. They don't dream because they know no dreams. They think everyone lives the way they do. But then one day they look around and see how other kids live and they get angry because they know how much they've been denied.

And they grow up angry - if they grow up at all.

It's an endless cycle.

The rich get rich and the poor get poorer.

Children born in poverty, exposed only to poverty, don't stand a chance.

Which is why the audience cried going home.