Is there anything left to say about Smile Orange?

Who amongst us, almost four decades after its initial run, does not know its quintessentially Jamaican protagonist, the pragmatic and irrepressible trickster Ringo Smith?  He long ago escaped the typed page, long ago bounced off the Barn Theatre stage into our collective consciousness, more real to us than Paul Bogle or Marcus Garvey, men who lived and died but have since faded into the obscure purgatory of history textbooks and primary school walls.

Who amongst us, almost three million souls surrounded by white sand and water, is ignorant of its truths?  Smile Orange tells us about ourselves, as art should—about living in America’s shadow; about using what you have to get what you want; about wanting what you can’t have; about the white man and the black man and everything in between; and finally, about how Jamaica is, and must be, a place where these truths are self-evident.

And who amongst us is not indebted to its scribe, the incomparable Trevor Rhone?  The man cobbled together a rural childhood, a foreign education and an intractable dissatisfaction with his circumstance into a string of stage plays stretching from The Gadget (1969) and Smile Orange (1971) to Old Story Time (1979) and Two Can Play (1982). Even that impressive list underrepresents his contribution to the ongoing experiment called Jamaica—for instance, co-writing The Harder They Come (1972) with the late Perry Henzell.

Smile Orange was Rhone’s first hit, and deservedly so, running for 245 performances. Although the new production is at The Little Little Theatre, rather than the more historically resonant Barn, the magic lingers still. So much time has passed that the stage, dressed and waiting for actors, is by itself a kind of museum, a time capsule preserving the hopes, fears and laughs of a people who were scarcely ten years into independence—Miss Brandon’s curved desk, the pastel orange and sea green walls, the cursive hotel insignia, the scuffed furniture in the waiters’ area.

And then the lights are up, Ringo bustles down the aisle, Joe changes his coat, Miss Brandon fixes her make-up, and Smile Orange pulls you into its peculiar world, now simultaneously past and present. Ringo, once a young, lithe Carl Bradshaw, much later an energetic Glen Campbell, is now the wiry, madcap Donald Anderson, who slips comfortably into the iconic orange waistcoast and bowtie. Everaldo Creary is pitch-perfect as the bumbling, blubbering Buss Boy, Cyril—almost crippled with fear, his scenes with Anderson crackle and pop. Shaun Drysdale and Gracia Thompson as Joe and Miss Brandon are convincing, if not captivating; Hugh Douse, as the Assistant Manager Mr. O’Keefe, is less so.

Such a trifle cannot spoil the show, especially with Mr Rhone as director. But with such talent, why this play, yet again?  We still need cogent voices to skewer our lives in song and dance, on stage and screen. The world is different than it was forty years ago, when Mr Rhone and his friends turned a residence into a theatre, and thus a house into a home. Why not a new play, from hands informed by all that has gone before, by gadgets and games, schools and smiles, oranges and old stories?

If you haven’t seen Smile Orange, go and see it. If you have seen it, go and remind yourself. But in the warm afterglow of the production, when smiles come easily, if you see Trevor Rhone, tell him he still has the last laugh, inside, waiting to come out.

You hold in your hands an invention of the mid-19th century—the modern newspaper.  In 1844, Samuel Morse (the code guy) opened America’s first telegraph line, which wired information at the speed of light.  Distances collapsed to zero; the telegraph, in an instant, made geography meaningless.  Information—from everywhere, to everywhere—exploded.  The first newspaper in the West Indies, The Jamaica Gleaner (heard of it?), began at roughly the same time.

“The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”  Neil Postman was right; the wire transformed newspapers from publishers of reasoned opinion into purveyors of information—as much as they could print, as fast as they could print.  The weekend forecast, Sharapova’s forehand, the President’s foreplay—all in the name of selling copy, and selling copies.

In the last century, movies, broadcast television, cable television and now the Internet have all superseded newspapers, manufacturing “the news” in ever-accelerating cycles, in more exciting formats (Moving pictures!  In colour!  All the time!  Now interactive!), in more ubiquitous media.  Wait—are you reading this online?

Since the American media is not exempt from either narcissism or existential angst, and since they consider themselves highly “newsworthy”, there is no shortage of movies about movies (Sunset Boulevard, The Player), movies about television (Network, Good Night and Good Luck), television about television (Murphy Brown, Sports Night), television about newspapers (Early Edition, The Wire), newspapers about movies (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter), and movies about newspapers (Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday).  And just in: State of Play.

State of Play follows seasoned reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) at the fictional Washington Globe (a stand-in for The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, or The New York Times).  Both Cal and the Globe, despite credentials and experience, face obsolescence.  Cal, writing for the print edition, is older, slower and more expensive than the always-on bloggers from the online half—like young Della Frye (a cute-as-a-buttoned-sweater Rachel McAdams).  The Globe, under new owner MediaCorp, is under pressure to be profitable, pressure which falls on editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren).

Things get worse when Cal’s old college roommate, Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), is embroiled in a sex scandal.  Cal and Della, both assigned to the story, represent two conflicting approaches—one grounded in thoroughness and objectivity, the other in expediency and populism.  Editor Lynne, and the newspaper, occupy the no-man’s-land between them, full of paradoxes and non sequiturs—trying to wring unbiased coverage from reporters corrupted by human emotions, trying to win readers while holding to stodgy conventions, trying to be an independent watchdog while leashed to a huge corporation.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) is nostalgic both for the mini-renaissance of 1970s American filmmaking and the halcyon days of the press.  The journalist hero of Watergate, Bob Woodward, was immortalized by über-hunk Robert Redford in All the President’s Men (another movie about newspapers).  The real Bob Woodward appears in State of Play, which was almost shelved when the original actor to play reporter Cal dropped out—über-hunk Brad Pitt.

Too often, the media invents tidy answers instead of asking hard questions.  State of Play asks just one: What is happening to newspapers, and will they be around to tell us?  To which comes our tidy answer: We sure hope so.

Terminator Salvation, like the war in which its characters are caught, had many ways to go wrong. It is the fourth iteration of the action franchise, by itself a bad omen (see Jaws IV: The Revenge, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Live Free or Die Hard et al).

The 1984 original, The Terminator, and its 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, both became instant classics, not least because of their innovative director, James Cameron (who would later helm Titanic). Sequels to sequels cannot budget for innovation, however, so cheaper talent gets subbed in (e.g., Joe Johnston for Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park III). McG, a man best known for obnoxious music videos and noxious Charlie’s Angels movies, directs Terminator Salvation.

Better men than McG have been crushed under the canonical weight of their franchises, done in by expectations or a desire to leave their mark. Joel Schumacher killed Batman & Robin after taking over from edgy A-lister Tim Burton (Batman, Batman Returns); Sylvester Stallone self-destructed Rocky IV. And the recently cancelled TV spinoff The Sarah Connor Chronicles exposes Warner Bros. as a negligent caretaker (unlike Sarah Connor herself).

The series also leaned heavily on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s beefcake bad-guy (Terminator), turned good-guy (Judgment Day), turned both (Rise of the Machines). Now that the Austrian is too old to play an ageless robot (or, as an American politician, has become one), Christian Bale provides the testosterone as resistance leader John Connor. This makes Bale the face of two concurrent blockbuster series, Terminator and Batman, as well as Michael Mann’s upcoming gangster flick Public Enemies, risking overexposure.

But Terminator Salvation doesn’t go wrong—it shows respect towards its predecessors without being sycophantic, it rejuvenates the series for a generation that considers the muscled Arnold a punchline, and it’s a good story to boot.

John Connor has become that which the earlier films tried to prevent: de facto leader of a de facto resistance (because most of humanity has been killed). The genocidal enemy is Skynet (a kind of evil, self-aware Internet), whose unstoppable land, air and sea machines are mopping up the last bands of survivors.

In the first film, a member of the resistance, Kyle Reese, is sent back in time (to 1984) to protect Sarah Connor, future mother of John. They fall in love and Kyle unwittingly becomes John’s father. In Salvation’s 2018, the adult John must now find and protect a teenaged Kyle, yet to be sent back in time, and who doesn’t know that John, his idol, is his son.

The subverted father-son dynamic forms the core of the film—as they both search for each other—around which many digital action sequences are built. Those sequences, and the film’s overall aesthetic, are heavily influenced by Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopia Children of Men (in turn influenced by the 1960s French New Wave)—extended single-shot takes and a desaturation process called bleach bypass lend the footage a cinéma vérité feel (although the effect is tempered by all the killer robots).

So McG redeems himself. Christian Bale, juggling franchises, tries to become Harrison Ford. And for now, Terminator lives on.

But their future is not set.  Cue percussive bombast.

As a general rule, there are only two plays running at any given time in Kingston.  One is an American or British import, such as Love Letters by A R Gurney (American) or Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn (British), preloaded with accolades (Pulitzer nominations, celebrity casting, extended runs), produced at a prominent location (Philip Sherlock, Little Little Theatre) and attended by no one (except the family of the cast and people who write criticism for major newspapers).

The second is a homegrown comedy, which we can fictionally call Get Dem Fi Laugh, written by an untrained playwright, featuring an ensemble cast of a half dozen or so talented actors playing stock roles straight out of the commedia dell’arte—the clown, the shopkeeper, the cavalier, the statesman—embroiled in a plot involving adultery and/or jealousy, launched on a stage the size of a large walk-in closet and frequented by the entire working-class population of Jamaica, from the bureaucrat down to the bureau-maker.

At the moment, Money Worries, Bashment Granny 2, Backbiter, and to a lesser extent, RRR 2K9, are all Get Dem Fi Laugh, trivially distinguished by different names and name actors.  As a test, find the page in today’s Gleaner where they are advertised—look for verbal klaxons like ‘Comedy Extravaganza!’ and ‘Comedy Spectacle!’—and cover the names with your hand.  Now try to tell which group of smiling, bug-eyed faces is which.

This is our quandary (or, in patois, our kraasiz).  To enjoy theatre that respects its audience and medium, we must turn to (mostly foreign) plays that have little to say about the Jamaican condition; to enjoy cultural relevance, we must endure productions that often fail to observe fundamentals of plot and character development.

Adrian Nelson has resolved that quandary.

His latest play, Dream Merchant, is a dream come true—a playscript with a solid structure and believable, playable, theatrical characters, under the guidance of experienced, trained hands and brought to life by extraordinary actors—in other words, a ‘roots’ play rooted in theatre essentials.  It’s an honest-to-goodness comedy extravaganza!

Dream Merchant is the story of a poor country girl, Shauna (Kedicia Stewart), who, while washing dirty linen for a living, dreams of music stardom.  Her boyfriend (Tesfa Edwards) is a struggling young farmer with no future.  On the advice of her neighbour, Miss Shirley, a former go-go dancer played by the hilarious and healthily-proportioned Dorothy Cunningham, she enters a talent contest promising a record contract in Kingston.  There, she meets producer Mr Biggs (Ronald Goshop) and his wife, Ms Ting (Audrey Reid).

The party of five is a joy to watch—all the actors, including relative newcomers Stewart and Edwards, find a rhythm with each other, balancing their deliveries, aware of each other’s energy and space.  Director Carol Lawes has done well by Mr Nelson, handling his material and her actors with care and confidence.

All five turn in sharp performances.  Stewart is ruthless in the way that beautiful women can be.  Edwards, with the least to do, is appropriately downtrodden.  Dorothy Cunningham, as the reformed woman of faith, is a master of physical moments—if for nothing else, you must see Ms Cunningham move her derriere.  Ronald Goshop, whom we met decades ago in sturdy classics such as Smile Orange, gives his Mr Biggs a casual dominance that works well.

And then there is the phenomenon known as Audrey Reid.  Even amongst esteemed peers, she stands out.  Even with a creative character, she elevates it.  To watch her onstage is to watch a leopard in the wild—a creature in her natural element, supremely comfortable but never relaxed, always moving with purpose and expediency, no wasted steps, no wasted breath.

There is an animalistic edge to her portrayal of the embattled-but-never-battered wife, Ms Ting.  Her lines with Mr Goshop slice like a bird’s talon, leaving something acrid in the air between them.  She conveys the possibility of danger the way animals do—with heightened senses and pulses of energy.  Only Glen Campbell may match her comic timing in contemporary theatre.  She can throw a withering look like a knife, bring it back, and then throw it to the audience for an additional laugh.

Here’s wishing Mr Nelson can be a merchant of many dreams to come.  Dream Merchant is currently running at Centerstage.

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom far, far away, across a mighty ocean, there lived a woman whom everyone called Jo.

One day, Jo was taking the train from Manchester to London when an idea—a big, glorious, billion-dollar, global franchise idea—popped into her head. It was the story of a orphaned boy wizard. Jo wrote the idea down, and when she got home, she kept writing. She wrote for the next five years, stopping only to move to Portugal, get married, and have a child. She named the girl Jessica, and the boy wizard Harry Potter.

To Jo’s surprise, children all over the world liked Harry Potter. So she wrote more books. Children even found their parents reading Harry Potter, too. Jo sold so many books, she became richer than the Queen of the Kingdom.

Far to the west, the nobles of another state heard about Harry Potter and Jo’s money. Being nobles, they wanted some of the money for themselves. So they flew Jo over and asked her if they could leverage her original properties across multiple platforms, finding synergies between their media conglomerate and transnational corporations for merchandising tie-ins, yada, yada, yada. J K Rowling said yes, and the nobles jumped with joy, giggled with greed and lived happily ever after.

The five Harry Potter movies (with three more to come) have amassed about US$5 billion, making it one of the most lucrative film franchises ever. That kind of cash inspires the sincerest form of flattery. Thus was adapted J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, which harvested another billion. And C S Lewis’s classic children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, whose third installment is now about to begin filming. And Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. And now, Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy comes to the silver screen, starting with Inkheart.

Funke’s three fantasy novels—Inkheart, Inkspell and Inkdeath—and soon, their film counterparts, suffer from being in the right place at the wrong time. Which is to say, these perfectly enjoyable stories, originally written in German, have the bad luck to be turned into films at the tail end of a decade stuffed with adaptations of children’s fantasy literature. Inkheart, the film, while not boring, feels old before it’s begun.

Our protagonist is a young girl, Meggie (like Ofelia from Guillermo del Toro’s exquisite 2006 fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth) who loves to read (like Ofelia and also Harry Potter) and has lost a parent (like Ofelia, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings). An everyday object—a book—transports her to a fantastical new world (like Ofelia (an insect), Harry (a letter), Frodo (a ring) and the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia (a wardrobe)!). In the name of all that is tragic and magic, how many European-dwelling young bookworm orphans is too many?

The central conceit of Inkheart is the permeability of the printed page—losing yourself in a good book, in Funke’s world, can be a permanent displacement. But Inkheart’s imaginary world is not rendered imaginatively—both the CGI (computer-generated imagery) cloud that is the villainous Shadow and the wooden clunk that is Brendan Fraser feel like outtakes from The Mummy.

As Meggie’s aunt says, “I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page, where it belongs.” The film’s producers should have taken that line of ink to heart.

Just as a priest feels during Carnival or a professor feels during Christmas, so a cinéphile feels during the summer—everyone else is enjoying themselves, and you’re the only one seeing the mindless rituals for what they are.

For summer is blockbuster season, when the six American majors (Sony, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal and Dreamworks SKG) release their tentpole pictures—the sinfully expensive, lavishly marketed mega-movies that determine the financial health of their parents. One Titanic (20th Century Fox/Paramount) or Spider-Man (Sony) or The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.) can single-handedly offset a year’s worth of box office flops.

Since a tentpole film is potential manna from heaven, the studios ram-pack it with every imaginable attraction—nudity, sexuality, violence, foul language, drugs—all the things on the rating labels, which are advertisements disguised as warnings (Don’t see this movie—it has SEX! GRAPHIC SEX!).

Of course, this sardine approach to filmmaking doesn’t exactly churn out masterpieces, so the studios spend more millions on publicity blitzes, to make sure we all see the movie at the same time, on its opening weekend, before we have a chance to tell our friends what a piece of crap it is. And we fall for it like faithful disciples, nattering excitedly about this movie or that, gushing about what we have to see and can’t afford to miss.

At its worst, this means execrable fluff like Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney), in which a 16-year-old actress caught between childhood and Hollywood plays a 16-year-old actress caught between childhood and Hollywood, her innocence and privacy sacrificed at the altar of global commercialism. (Disney sells Montana-themed clothes, watches, bedding, luggage, shoes, makeup, spa kits, and toys. Last year Miley Cyrus, then 15, personally earned more than US$25,000,000. Yes, that’s the right number of zeroes.)

At its best, however, we get Angels & Demons (Sony), a thriller that lives up to its name and its ampersand, with compelling (though not complicated) dualities between science and theology, logic and faith, modernity and antiquity. And, yes, good and evil, though as the film reminds us in its crash course through Catholic history, deciding which is which is usually in the eye of the beheader.

Angels & Demons is the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code (2006), also directed by Ron Howard, adapted by Akiva Goldsman, scored by Hans Zimmer, and starring Tom Hanks. Both properties were originally novels by Dan Brown, who wrote Angels & Demons first, making it both a sequel and a prequel, depending on the medium. Because everyone, including the Pope, read The Da Vinci Code, Brown now rubs shoulders with Stephen King, John Grisham and the other rich, chosen few to escape the bargain bins at Barnes & Noble.

The Holy Grail for every popular fiction writer is to create a serialized character that captures the attention of the lonely secretary and the airport traveler—Jonathan Kellerman unravels stories of child psychologist Alex Delaware; Sue Grafton unfolds Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries; Elizabeth George investigates Inspector Lynley. These uniformly smart, capable protagonists are a dime a dozen, which is why you’ve either never heard of them, or have them stacked beside your bed.

Paperbacks and motion pictures peddle the same diversions, so Dan Brown and Sony was a match made in, well, heaven. Angels & Demons, the film, once again follows Robert Langdon (Hanks), a Harvard professor of religious iconography, as he trips along a chain-reaction of Catholic clues embedded in action sequences.

The action academic has its origin in 1930s characters such as bronzed Amazonian scientist Doc Savage, and has its archetype in Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, archaeologist and adventurer, whose movies were set in the 1930s. Robert Langdon has neither whip nor hat, only his wits and a decent haircut. At the behest of the Vatican, he is trying to locate both a small explosive that will obliterate the Holy See, and four missing Cardinals, the front-runners to become the next Pope.

What could have been a God-awful mess is intelligently paced by director Howard (A Beautiful Mind) and comfortably inhabited by Hanks. The required kinetics are motivated by Langdon’s urgent search. In one breathtaking sequence, he must escape, before he suffocates, from an electronically-operated, oxygen-regulated, bulletproof, air-tight chamber that has lost power—the Vatican Archives, home to sacred scientific texts like Galileo’s writings.

Take it from a blaspheming cinéphile—Angels & Demons is good, not evil. Just leave the reverence at the door.

Dear Reader,

The most endearing little play opened last weekend, and you have got to see it.  It’s called Love Letters.  It’s very simple.  Two actors come out on stage and sit at desks tilted away from each other.  On some nights, it’s Hilary Nicholson and Paul Issa (we’ll get to them in a bit); on other nights, Nadean Rawlins and Alwyn Scott.

The two characters are Melissa and Andy.  The whole play is Melissa and Andy reading their correspondence—their love notes and greeting cards and their many, many letters from grade school through college and into adulthood—without seeing or touching each other on stage.  Nobody gets up.  Nobody falls over a couch.  Neither Oliver Samuels nor Shebada springs from the wings, two scenes in, to play the fool.

To tell you it is good, or that you should grab all your friends, pile them into an SUV, and cram them into the hard, fold-down seats at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts still doesn’t do Love Letters justice.  It is not good.  It is great theatre.  Extraordinary theatre.  The closest thing to proof of its greatness is that it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (for Drama) in 1990.  The real proof, of course, is when you laugh and then stop laughing, cry and then stop crying, wishing for it to go on and to end at the same time.

The epistolary form is fully utilized—the mediation of the page allows the characters to hide their affection, or their disappointment, or to just plain hide.  When Melissa has an unpleasant summer with her father, she stops writing.  Her void hurts Andy more than her words.  Similarly, when Andy disappears after the Navy sends him to Japan, Melissa begs him to speak to her.  The American playwright, A R Gurney, understands that dialogue interrupts silence, not vice versa.  The dialogue in Love Letters is sometimes staccato, as the two friends fire short messages back and forth, and sometimes operatic, with Andy penning pages upon pages for his confidante.

Since the characters say so much about themselves and each other, and since the words do not have to be memorized, the actors could have succumbed to laziness, phoning in easy performances.  Laziness aside, Love Letters is the kind of production that lends itself to the busy actor (like Nadean Rawlins).

But Paul Issa delivers his lines with deliberate care and an understated strength that grabs you and holds on.  I am here, he seems to say, and I dare you to ignore me.  You can’t, and you shouldn’t.  His Andy is a textbook study in modern theatre acting: eschewing chewing the scenery, he instead experiences the play as an organic, live event—as it unfolds for us, it happens to him.  Hilary Nicholson is good, and better than most would be, but never allows us to forget that she is acting, and we are watching.

Brian Heap, for some time now, has been staging excellent, acclaimed works like Love Letters—theatre that falls outside, often far outside, the Jamaican mainstream—and he should be rewarded for his efforts.  You should reward him.  Skip the movies next weekend, and pay for the privilege to know Love Letters.

Your friend always,
The Gleaner

Let’s start with the obvious and the obligatory: Star Trek, the new American movie, not to be confused with the 1966 television series Star Trek, or the four series it spawned, or the 1979 movie Star Trek, or any of its nine sequels, meekly goes where every blockbuster picture has gone before, and must go, and will continue to go.

Which means, in no particular order: young, attractive Caucasian lead actors (because it must sell in West Virginia); one token Black American supporting actor (because it must sell in West Harlem); loud noises, explosions and special effects (because it must sell to young men); unnecessary female nudity (ditto); fight scenes, sex scenes, chase scenes (ditto, ditto, ditto); catchphrases (because it must feel familiar); fancy camerawork and editing (because it must feel new); a foreign-sounding enemy (because Americans like to collect them); and the promise of a sequel (because Mercedes don’t buy themselves).

This blow-stuff-up, blow-up doll, shrink-wrapped form of entertainment short-circuits our synapses, and after a while we get used to the idea that we’re not supposed to think when we’re at the movies. This works very well for the major movie studios, run disproportionately by healthy, wealthy men from Los Angeles who understand, even though they’d never touch the stuff themselves, that ice cream will always sell because it feels good while you’re eating it. Never mind that it’s bad for us; we’ll eat it, anyway.

Hollywood makes the filmic equivalent of triple chocolate sundaes with sprinkles and syrup and two cherries on top—movies that are really, really bad for us, but feel so good while we’re watching that we keep coming back. As with ice cream, the damage is done a little bit at a time, so we can always justify one more indulgence.

Here’s the plot summary for Star Trek, if you need to know. James Kirk, from Iowa (ticket sales!), is a rebel whose father martyred himself in a battle (check!) against an evil race (double check!), the Romulans. (The bad guys in the original series, circa America’s Korean and Vietnamese invasions, looked Oriental; in this movie, unsurprisingly, they look vaguely Arabic.)  James gets talked into joining the Starfleet, where he flirts with a girl named Uhura, befriends a man named Leonard McCoy and outwits an alien named Spock. Either those names mean something to you, and you’ll get excited watching them spout ridiculous dialogue, or they don’t, and you won’t. And, yeah, James eventually fights the Romulans.

May now marks the beginning of the summer blockbuster season, which has crept earlier and earlier as studios fight to be first. Last week’s megamovie was Wolverine, or X-Men 4; this week is Star Trek 11, new and improvised; still to come are Transformers 2, Ice Age 3, Terminator 4, and Harry Potter 6. Oodles of ice cream.

It’s worth noting that there are filmmakers, with one foot inside and one foot outside the Hollywood dream factory, who try to make the audience engage their material and think about stuff. People like Quentin Tarantino (whose World War II flick, Inglourious Basterds [sic], opens in August), Woody Allen (Whatever Works, in June), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant, with Matt Damon, October), and Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, hopefully coming soon).

Go see their movies, and skip all the star-filled dreck.

‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.’  Those are the last lyrics of ‘Nature Boy’, a timeless song about human nature, made famous sixty years ago by the equally timeless Nat King Cole.  So simple to say—or for Nat, to sing—yet so difficult to do.  Forget government bonds and collateralized debt obligations—the largest investment you can make in life is to love someone.  And as the world’s stockbrokers now know all too well, without trust, your investment isn’t worth very much.

Trust is what makes relationships work, and doubt and suspicion are what kills them.  Writer/director Tony Gilroy knows this, as does anyone who’s ever loved and lost.  In his new movie, Duplicity, he takes the issue of trust to its logical extreme, turning his lovebirds into actual spies, engaged in real subterfuge, guessing and second-guessing, crossing and double-crossing, too scared to commit until they know the other person won’t hurt them.

This is the man who penned three Jason Bourne film adaptations and pulled double duty on the sly thriller Michael Clayton, which means: a) he knows a thing or two about movie spies; b) he likes writing for Hollywood’s leading men; and c) expect complications.  Duplicity gives us not Matt Damon, not George Clooney, but Clive Owen as star hunk, and Julia Roberts for him to chase.  Owen is Ray Koval, formerly of British intelligence, and Roberts is Claire Stenwick, formerly of American intelligence.  If the set-up and the names sound like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel, it’s because Gilroy is head-over-heels in love with the pictures Hollywood used to make sixty years ago (back when Nat was king).

Chandler’s most famous character, hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe, was played most famously by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946).  Bogart owns the screen, slouching around in tailored suits and cigarette smoke, and the camera lingers on his face as much as on his very young, soon-to-be very famous costar, Lauren Bacall.  Like Duplicity, the dialogue is honed and shorn to fine-edged perfection; the characters fall in love by trading barbs.

Duplicity is set in New York (along with Dubai, London, Miami and Rome), the world capital for the world’s capital, which is why our spies are there—they are working for warring conglomerates.  The second time we see Clive Owen, he is striding down a Manhattan sidewalk, and he fits the city like a comfortable leather shoe.  He brings to mind that other suave, cinematic Brit who made New York his onscreen own—Cary Grant.  Both men seem made for their bespoke gray suits, instead of the other way round.  They belong to us, larger-than-life, every man’s exemplar, every woman’s dream.

Even Claire Stenwick’s name is homage to a Golden Age star, Barbara Stanwyck.  She was one of the first femmes to be fatale, in movies like Double Indemnity (1944).  Julia Roberts doesn’t duplicate Stanwyck’s cocktail of sin and seduction, but she’s still a tall drink of water.  Like Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Grace Kelly, or any of the enduring, luminescent American actresses, Julia Roberts is irresistible, whether wrapped in bed sheets or strutting across an Italian courtyard.

Ultimately, Duplicity is a love story enthralled by love stories, a romance written by a hopeless romantic, who longs for a time when the movie never ended, when you couldn’t tell where the character stopped and the movie star began, where you could trick yourself into believing you were really watching Clive Owen and Julia Roberts fall in love.  Duplicitous?  Definitely.  But in the end, so worth it.  Just like, well, just like Nat used to sing—‘Then I could say, “Baby, baby, I love you”/Just like those guys in moving pictures all do.’

Every successful movement needs followers.  Every follower needs a leader.  And every leader needs an enemy.  This chain of truths partially explains the crowd at Sagicor Auditorium on Friday night, gathered under the rallying cry of The Vagina Monologues, a movement of women led by American playwright Eve Ensler, whose enemy is—to put it bluntly—men.

Now, there’s nothing particularly wrong with hating men, or more specifically heterosexual men, who have demonstrated, throughout recorded history, an almost pathological propensity for degrading, demoralizing, demeaning and destroying the women in their societies.  The horrors visited upon women by men, right now, around the world, shock the modern liberal sensibility into arrest—forced female circumcision, ritualized gang-rape, community stonings; the list, unfortunately, goes on and on.

But finding a clearly identifiable enemy—in this case, straight men—oversimplifies the problems that women face.  It ignores the many positive aspects of heterosexual union, it reduces a complex, multigendered, transgendered spectrum into an artificial superimposed binary, and, most importantly, it abrogates women of their complicity in female oppression.  For instance, most young Jamaican women face enormous pressure from their mothers, aunts and other female relatives to get married, despite the unhappy marriages in which most of these older women feel trapped.  This cycle perpetuating the status quo will not be broken simply by hating men.

Thus The Vagina Monologues, since its debut in 1996, has rightly come under criticism, from men and women, conservatives and feminists alike, for its somewhat monotonic depiction of men, and their ties to rape, especially in light of one skit, ‘The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could’, which celebrates a 13-year-old girl seduced by an older woman with the aid of alcohol.

That may be its one flaw.

Because The Vagina Monologues is also the most liberating, lively, electrifying time you could have at the theatre this year.  It’s smart.  It’s funny.  Wickedly funny.  So funny you will cry.  It’s heart-wrenching.  Gut-wrenching.  So sad you have to laugh.  It’s warm.  It’s wild.  It seduces you.  It slaps you in the face.  It carries you, as on a moving walkway, inescapably towards its celebration of women, of femininity, of, well… vaginas.

Vaginas are at the center, so to speak, of Eve Ensler’s play, which grew out of her interviews with over two hundred women of all ages, shapes and backgrounds.  There’s ‘Hair’, performed competently by Rushae Watson, about a woman whose husband wanted her to shave her, um, you know.  There’s ‘The Flood’ (Makeda Solomon, almost persuasive), about a septuagenarian whose gushing sexual excitement as a teenager scarred her for life.  There’s ‘The Vagina Workshop’, done by the captivating, talented, attuned Rishille Bellamy-Pelicie, about one New York woman who finds sexual liberation in a group therapy session.  Her measured steps through embarrassment, doubt, fear and discovery are, by itself, worth the ticket price.

Always-excellent grand dame Leonie Forbes graces us with ‘Hey Miss Pat’, a monologue Ensler added after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  You’re not supposed to knock a grand dame, but it would have been even better without the script in her hands.  The truth is that the show, under the guidance of director Fabian Thomas, is too long, at a sweltering three hours.  (Note to Mr Thomas: if we wanted to sit in a hot chamber for three hours of wounded monologuing, we’d have gone to Finance Minister Audley Shaw’s budget presentation.)  The less-rehearsed pieces, like ‘Hey Miss Pat’, ‘Crooked Braid’ (Native American stories), and ‘They Beat the Girl out of my Boy, or so They Tried’ (transgender stories), should have been excised.

In the original show, Ensler performed all the monologues herself.  Here, the cast is a dozen women, including Noelle Kerr, who finally has a chance to show some acting chops (unlike on Royal Palm Estate, which makes everyone look bad); Nadean Rawlins (Season Rice), engaging and committed as usual; and Hilary Nicholson, appropriately affected and uptight in a rant about tampons, douches, and other invasive paraphernalia.

The Vagina Monologues is now the centerpiece of a global fight against violence towards women, which climaxes each year with V-Day, a celebration of womanhood that usually includes performances of Ensler’s play.  Part of the proceeds from Friday’s performance went to the Sisters to Sisters organization.  Sadly, that means you’ll have to wait a whole year for another taste of Vagina.