Developing logically from the earlier Bond characters who painfully acquire knowledge about society and slowly commit themselves to action are Wang and the Ferryman in The Bundle…. Wang is not a devoted revolutionary in the beginning of the play. He learns gradually, like Lear, the basic lesson that all suffer and that only action relieves suffering. The Ferryman has a more difficult time accepting this new activism because he has always lived with society's repressive morality. Nevertheless, he rejects his old way of thinking to accept a new one…. [His] willingness to toss an oar into the water as a warning to Wang and the other revolutionaries typifies the positive gesture that Bond's heroes eventually make. The radical politics of these two characters, especially Wang, are more extreme than the behavior of many of the earlier characters (Wang sacrifices the life of one child to save the lives of many others), but the roots for such behavior have been in Bond's characters all along. In The Bundle, however, the characters' actions succeed as never before. Still, the revolution, an open-ended process in Bond's earlier plays, is by no means complete in this play. A socialist utopia is not achieved. The landowner still resides in a Provincial capital protected by the Emperor's soldiers, and San-Ko, one of Wang's fellow workers, makes it clear that they have only begun building up the river bank, and much remains to be done.

In The Woman … the main character, Hecuba, withdraws to an island to escape the horror of the world and to shun all further forms of responsibility…. What compels Hecuba to act is the arrival of Heros and his men, who search for the statue of the goddess of fortune and who believe that Hecuba knows where it is. (pp. 515-16)

If the pursuit of the statue itself is symbolic of irrationality, Heros's behavior represents the irrational in a more extreme form. He is completely willing to endanger his own life and the lives of his men to obtain an object….

Hecuba overcomes her need to withdraw when she skillfully takes advantage of Heros's moment of weakness…. Hecuba now uncovers her eye, and for the first time, she is able to appreciate the beauty of her surroundings. Her new ability to see also suggests her new understanding that compassion and concerned action must be asserted over irrationality. (p. 516)

A discussion of Bond's theme of knowledge and action would not be complete without some mention of the shorter plays. There is the same commitment to knowledge and action in them. In Black Mass …, Christ, unable to tolerate any longer the suffering he sees about him, comes down from His cross and poisons the wine of the Prime Minister of South Africa. In Passion …, near the end of the play, Christ comes to be crucified. He realizes how mad people have become when He sees that another has already been crucified in His place. He condemns this society as "a hell worse than anything my father imagined" and leaves in disgust. In Stone …, the central character is tricked and cheated by several people on his journey to the Stone Mason. When he understands that it is the Stone Mason who is ultimately the cause of his oppression (being forced to carry a heavy stone), he kills him.

Finally, in A-A-American …, which consists of the burlesque Grandma Faust and the documentary The Swing, Paul moves from total innocence to a state of awareness. Learning that his society is corrupt, he actively shows contempt at the end of the play. As the stagehands joke about the killing of Fred—a man suspected but only suspected of raping the daughter of one of the town's important citizens—Paul drops a dime on the stage near them to see them struggle for it and to show his disgust. Their scramble for the coin fulfills Paul's earlier prophecy that "One day your people gonna lynch each other in the gutter over a drop dime." The stagehands, while not exactly lynching each other, show that the potential for violence is ever-present, and Fred's death, the night before, proved that everyone is potentially a victim in such a violent society.

And yet understanding of Bond's theme of awareness and action reveals that his work is one of the most consistent rejections of pessimism in contemporary literature. Bond's "rational theatre" denies the view that man is innately aggressive, that the present social order is the best man can do, and that man can do nothing to solve present problems. In place of such pessimism Bond offers the vision that a good society creates good men, that the present social order is its own form of violence, and that man can change his society. The optimism is tempered by realism, for he knows that any change will be slow and difficult. Nevertheless, in an age in which solipsism, nihilism, and defeatism are all too prevalent, Bond's views challenge people both to recognize corruption and to accept responsibility through action. (p. 517)