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If you haven’t yet visited the new Signature Center on West 42nd Street, you should go. It’s a $66 million architectural feast designed by Frank Gehry with three stages.

Maybe it’s intentionally ironic that the first show to open there is "Blood Knot." This 1961 two-hander by Athol Fugard takes place in a cramped, third-world shanty, quite the opposite of the corporate-financed mecca that surrounds it.

"Blood Knot," first presented in America in 1964, is an elemental, Biblical tale of two South African brothers: Morris and Zachariah, played with heartbreaking intelligence and sensitivity by Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo.

Morris is light-skinned and literate, the de facto housekeeper at the brothers’ shack, while rougher, darker-skinned Zachariah goes out each day to work as a guard. These brothers, who have different fathers, dream of buying farmland one day.

When Zachariah complains about how lonely he is, Morris gets him a pen pal. That’s when trouble starts: the pen pal is white, a distinct problem in apartheid-era South Africa.

Meticulously directed by Fugard himself, this wrenching, deeply humane drama is valuable today less as a blow against apartheid and more for its universal message of how we are all bound in painful brotherhood, despite the superficial barrier of skin color.

Socially resonant plays, top-notch acting and directing and an audience eager for meaty drama: I’d say the Signature Center is off to a brilliant start.