Living in a country with beggars at the traffic light, prostitutes on the corner, and gunmen in the streets drives home certain truisms. We, as a people, are dissatisfied. We, as a people, want more. We, as a people, are tired, frustrated and disillusioned with our jobs, our schools, our spouses and coworkers, our politicians and parties and government, our roads and buses and taxis and tolls, our bills and fees and taxes and payments and loans. That’s how you feel, right? Right.

This peculiar mix of apathy and anger builds inside you until you quit your job or start smoking, get drunk or get high, beat your wife or leave your husband, find God or try to kill yourself. Here’s a better idea. Go see Diana at Centerstage. You’ll feel better, and you’ll get to watch characters who do most of the above, anyway.

Patrick Brown populates his remounted playscript, Diana, with some long-suffering (and thus highly frustrated) Jamaicans, starting with its title character, a struggling nightclub dancer brought to life by Camille Davis (not to be confused with Cameal Davis, ascendant star of Dreamgirls). Davis provides a subject lesson in stage acting—the art of living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. The simplest yet most powerful pleasure of watching theatre is its immediacy, and Davis lets us witness her joys and heartbreak, her pain and relief, minute by minute, beat by beat. Lovely stuff.

The Jambiz stable, along with one inductee, fills out the other roles—Glen Campbell, with a paunch, as Diana’s employer, Pops; Courtney Wilson, with a bigger paunch, as her beloved; Chris Hutchinson, with a six-pack, as her wicked and wild suitor; and Sakina, with a washboard stomach, as her deaf-and-dumb best friend and exotic dance partner.

Glen Campbell and Sakina are instantly convincing, as expected for such talents. In recent years, Campbell has eased gracefully into more supporting roles without sacrificing either dignity or vivacity (which puts him in the fine company of actors like Edward G Robinson and Lewis Stone). His style has similarly concentrated—he conveys more by doing less.

Sakina’s onstage energy, by contrast, is ceaseless but infectious (if at times excessive). She has that elusive and intangible quality—presence—which insists, like a lover, on your gaze.

Wilson, though not as seamless, warms up by the middle of the first act, and he and Davis display the familiar body language of a couple. Hutchinson fails to nuance his muscled thug, Babyface, spending his time swaggering around the stage.

Diana reflects the comfort of a director who feels at home. Trevor Nairne’s production is perfectly scaled to the confines of Centerstage—tucking a kitchen entrance upstage left, packing the walls with tchotchkes, and sending his actors to the downstage corners every so often. And there is one magical how-the-heck-did-they-do-that moment the first time Diana’s battered, broken house changes into Pops’ luminescent nightclub.

Such directorial competence is rare enough in local playhouses, but with Diana, Nairne has done much more than block actors on a well-built set. Through the judicious and precise use of the tools of theatre, Diana throws us, without reserve or apology, into the aspirations of ordinary Jamaicans—the kind of working-class citizens who don’t have the time, the diplomas or the resources to read theatre reviews in the newspaper. Life is too short, and too hard, and too unforgiving.

One scene opens with Wilson alone on the stage. His character is waiting up, late at night, for Diana to return. Nairne kills the lights except for amber rays peeking through the louvres. We must wait for Diana as well. All of us, sitting in the dark, phones at the ready, waiting for a loved one to reach home safely.

Diana captures, and by its existence preserves, and therefore elevates, such elementary truths of living in Jamaica—the life of the construction worker, the dancer, the barman and the badman. No well-turned phrase or cheap industry award can repay Brown and Nairne (although they certainly help). The only appropriate tribute is your laughter, and your tears, and your applause.

Diana runs Wednesdays to Sundays at 8pm, with additional matinees on the weekend.

The new comedy from playwright Andrew Roach bills itself as ‘mystical’, ‘hilarious’ and ‘funny’ (doesn’t the second imply the third?), but perhaps all three could be replaced by another adjective—earnest. Ras Genie, which opened June 12th at the Pantry Playhouse, is an earnest comedy—built from drywall and dedication, the actors, sweating under hot floodlights, do their best to make the show work. The tragedy is that it doesn’t.

Ras Genie has its laughs, including a clergyman (Rowan Byfield, treading worn ground) whose liturgical literature draws from scriptures old and new—i.e., the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and Beenie Man. It has a deliciously absurd idea at its core, swirling two Abrahamic faiths together for its title character, a Rastafarian jinni. And the cast tackles the material with gusto—Carlene Taylor, as exotic dancer Wingie, and Peter Heslop, as the eponymous Ras Genie, both deliver spirited performances.

But comic absurdity and attitude cannot paper over structural flaws. Ras Genie is unsure of its protagonist. More time is spent with Wingie and her desire to find love, financial security, or a way out of the ghetto. The title, curtain call and expositional passages, however, favour her protector, the Genie, who swings improbably between wanting to return to his bottle and itching to be free.

Traditional Greek theatre sometimes climaxed with a deus ex machina—a god who appeared, a little too conveniently, to solve unsolvable problems and untangle tangled plots. Modern audiences, paying for their entertainment, frown on such arbitrary endings. Ras Genie’s second act contains what we could call a jinni ex machina, who appears without explanation and whisks Ras Genie away. It makes you want to supply the stage with an extra bottle or two.

It’s a shame, because Andrew Roach sprinkles Ras Genie with the kind of cultural commentary emblematic of ‘roots’ plays and essential to keeping society healthy and its leaders honest. Believing he can’t return to his glass house, the Genie laments on his bad luck—he’s stuck in Jamaica, of all places, with “Bruce (Golding) and Portia (Simpson-Miller) and the sliding dollar.”  Some of the characters aspire to the perceived acme of Cherry Gardens and Norbrook. And there’s the aforementioned Reverend, quoting Colossians and Capleton.

Roach also has a keen ear for the vernacular of his countrymen, and an affinity for the plight of the common man (and woman), traits shared with luminaries like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Wilde and Shaw, however, never left their characters without arcs and their plots without through-lines.

Given its flaws, Ras Genie feeds the idea, popular amongst the cocktail crowd (you know, the ones who live in Cherry Gardens and Norbrook), that ‘roots’ plays are a low form of entertainment. It’s hard to disagree that our marketplace is stuffed with the genre—turn to today’s Entertainment pages—or that many are mediocre. But what this country needs is more ‘roots’ plays, not less. To hell with Oscar Wilde. We need to be drowning in indigenous drama, our lives relived for us with imagination and intermission. William Shakespeare was little more than a talented hack banging out commissioned plays for the English masses, and he turned out alright.

Ras Genie lacks the makings of great art, but not because of its roots or its aspirations. Director Dahlia Harris, playwright Andrew Roach and their cohort of thespians just need to try again, keeping in mind always the importance of being earnest.

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.

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.

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

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.

Balfour Anderson, as described in the programme notes for No Compromise, has written 15 one-act plays and twice as many feature-length shows, including a couple L.T.M. pantomimes, supposedly our premier national showcase. The man has spent a lot of time putting pen to paper, or word to screen, or whatever his preferred method. Why, then, is his new play, about an office relationship, so flawed?

Why does Mr Thomas, a longtime executive, have it in for Monique, the new marketing manager, apart from the need for her character to face obstacles? Does Kathy, her best friend, have any purpose in life other than to visit Monique? Given that all Kathy does is offer Monique a willing ear, why does Monique talk awkwardly to herself in her office and apartment, instead of to Kathy as she otherwise does? Why does every sequence stretch well beyond its need? The first performance ran until quarter to eleven, not least because every sequence in the first act requires a set change. Most of Act Two takes place in a single master bedroom. Most of Act One, with little accommodation, could have transpired inside Monique’s office at Exquisite Perfumes.

The most serious flaw, however, is that Anderson abandons his protagonists in the second act. Up to intermission, their drives are clear—Stanley Preston, better at capturing scents than mates, is looking for a second chance at love; Monique Smith, having bounced between jobs, locations and relationships, is looking for stability at work and at home.

The first half of No Compromise is thus quite enjoyable, as Stanley and Monique dance around their attraction. Actors Bobby Smith and Aisha Davis fall short of looking in love, but their performances are still entertaining. Both make good use of their physicality. Smith has the air of a man who has always eaten well, and he borrows something from the pantaloon of old Italian theatre. Davis deploys her dancerly figure with the right restraint, teasing us as well as her fellow actors. Their scenes together, of which there are many, seem comfortable, although Davis may have been distracted by opening night jitters. Smith is at ease playing his enamoured businessman.

But having more or less achieved their objectives, the second act leaves them stranded, and No Compromise never fully recovers. Nadia Khan as confidante Kathy and Ainsley Whyte in dual roles as Mr Thomas and Pastor Myrie energize the stage with their comic timing and presence, but the actors cannot (and should not) rescue the drifting script.

Bobby Clarke’s direction is adequate, although the blocking (the art of moving the actors on the stage) could have better correlated with Stanley and Monique’s proximity to their goals, and the state of their relationship. Sound design is thoroughly effective, if a little conspicuous—music spilling through a security entrance evokes an entire nightclub; the noises of cell phones, which proliferate on the set, add a touch of realism.

Playwright Anderson tackles one of the unwieldy universals—the search for love. He gives us two of life’s messy acts—the excitement of the chase, and the stultifying routine that can subsequently steal in, like parasitic vines, and strangle a relationship. It’s just too bad No Compromise follows the same trajectory.

One half of arts criticism is, of course, to evaluate the work of art, to appraise it and to place it in context, as the product of a specific person or culture, a specific place or time, or all of the above. If the original work is transplanted to another time, another place, or another culture, that job becomes doubly difficult. Such is the case with Colored Girls, running this week at the Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts—an adaptation by Trevor Nairne, local playwright and director, of a seminal 30-year-old choreopoem by American artist Ntozake Shange.

Paulette Williams grew up after World War II in racially segregated St Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a wealthy black Air Force surgeon. She was bussed to a white school, where she suffered. She married young, and suffered. She separated, suffered, and attempted suicide. She changed her name to Ntozake Shange, moved to New York, and staged a collection of her poetry called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. The play went on to Broadway and pushed Shange into the American spotlight as a leading black feminist voice.

So Colored Girls is a work of intense pain, the pain of living a life doubly disadvantaged—being black and female in America—without any crutches except those you fashion for yourself. Seven actresses, draped in bright cloths, deliver monologues describing domestic abuse, the loss of virginity (voluntary and involuntary), unwanted pregnancy—the whole litany of psychological scars is laid bare on the stage, as the women have their innocence and naiveté forcibly removed by the men they encounter. The poems are filled with beautiful, layered, deeply moving writing—the harsh cadences arrest the listener, punctuated by softer ones that caress the ear.

Unfortunately, Trevor Nairne and the students under his direction fail to give the writing its due. Shange’s poetry is packaged as confessionals taking place in a balm yard, a spiritual space intended, according to director’s notes, to “amplify the healing” of the women, but which has the opposite effect. Worse, the confessions are under the guidance of three “revivalists”, led by a man! This is a cardinal sin. Not only does it sully the sacred feminine space created on stage, but it robs the women of their agency, effectively undermining the raison d’être for the piece. The revivalists also lend a counter-productive farcical tinge to a criminally serious piece of theatre, with outbursts and reprimands played for humour.

When practicing monologues, actors often use a fellow actor as a dummy to motivate their lines. The male revivalist, who remains on stage throughout, may have been there in this capacity, to help the seven actresses-in-training. As it is, their performances were uneven, with standout turns by Joan Sappleton and Risanne Martin. Mostly, the students are hampered by the need to deliver a performance—acting with a capital A, they play emotions rather than characters. The School of Drama could use a big Stanislavskian kick in the assignments.

But the second half of arts criticism is being a curator for the public—guiding, through cogent and articulate opinion, what should or should not be experienced. Colored Girls is still a must-see show, a brave and provocative work, staged and acted by people committed to their craft. Despite missteps and mistakes, Mr Nairne and his students should be proud to provide a glorious, life-affirming breath of fresh air from the indistinguishable gaggle of ensemble comedies in the marketplace.

The life of Rev Fr Richard Ho Lung – rebel cum priest cum rebel priest – is a story waiting to be told. It already has – in the autobiographical Diary of a Ghetto Priest, published in book form and a long-running column in the Jamaica Gleaner, where the founder and Superior General of the Missionaries of the Poor parses both his life and ours with his deep Christian faith and empathy for those in need in Jamaica. The urban-clergyman-provides-social-uplift kernel of his journey has many fictional (e.g., the 2001 American film Diary of a City Priest) and non-fictional precedents; Martin Luther King Jr’s early career followed a similar trajectory. All of which is to say that few excuses can be found for the incoherent, overreaching, dramatically bereft production on display last weekend at the Arena, Yes!, which fictionalizes his life.

Nevertheless, I will try to find one.

The director of a Ho Lung production usually faces a decidedly unusual task: transforming some half-dozen musical numbers into a narrative that will hold an audience for two hours (full disclosure: I performed with Fr Ho Lung’s theatre troupe for most of the 1990s). Other songs are added; dialogue written; choreography introduced, all with the aim of creating and enhancing a good story.

In years gone by, this fell on the shoulders of the incomparable Alwyn Bully, a Dominican director who adopted Jamaica, adapted Ho Lung, and spearheaded a string of hit shows (from Sugar Cain and The Rock to Jesus 2000 and Moses). By contrast, Yes! is directed by Gregory Thames, a longstanding member of the production team who steps into Alwyn’s long shadow but does not find his footing.

The play moves like an old car: too slowly, with the occasional jerk forward. Early scenes establish Father Luke (the protagonist, played adequately by perennial favourite Wynton Williams) as a man of the people, but he spends few moments amongst them. Adversaries appear and disappear without resistance or explanation – an irate Member of Parliament added tedium, not tension. Indulgent lighting, effects and costumes did not mask these (and other) structural flaws.

At times, Yes! approaches drama. Luke searches for a middle ground between the rigidly hierarchical church and the rigidly hierarchical ghetto; he confronts archbishops and dons with equal aplomb, and the parallels are perhaps unintended but striking. He also struggles with externalized internal demons who create authentic menace on stage.

A foreign reporter figure (Maylynne Walton, unconvincing) allows Thames to bring a videocamera on stage and film “live footage” of the inner city, projected on dual screens built into the set. The effect is twofold: newsfeed (and by extension all journalism) is stripped to its naked class bias, and we are given a second, warmer window into Jamaica’s forgotten families.

Standout performances include Chevaughn Clayton as a conflicted gunman and Michael Harris as Father Luke’s right-hand man. They uncover humanity in their characters and sing with conviction (Note to Thames: the National Arena has notoriously poor acoustics; staging a musical inside it makes for frustrating listening). The show would have benefitted from a smaller space (say, The Little Theater) and a longer run. Then, on the third weekend, after the curtain fell, a critic could have leaned back, whipped out his notebook, and scribbled: Yes!

When Shakespeare turned the world into his stage, he laid out seven ages, the third being “the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow”. Patrick Brown, the playwright behind comedy-of-errors Love Games, has his own, more malevolent, view – his lovers do not sigh; they slip in and out of shadows and bedsheets, and they have not just mistresses, but wives. Everyone is a control freak, but no one is in control. Let the games begin.

The cast of five (Glen Campbell, Camille Davis, Lakeisha Ellison, Noelle Kerr, and Chris Hutchinson) assumes multiple roles in a series of six independent (and uneven) vignettes about infidelity. The play is rescued from mediocrity by Campbell’s inordinate talent (more on him later) and Brown’s use of humor as medicine for Jamaica’s social ills.

The vignettes are laced with vitriol and violence (the men are usually armed and quick to anger) skillfully undercut by wit and wordplay (Prostitute: “Are you married?” Businessman: “Happily”.) And the overbearing, overconfident men end up diminished by the equally manipulative women – in one skit, a verbally abusive husband kept from sleep by his moping wife finds his affair exposed and loses both women at the same time. Still, Brown’s responsibility as a member of the cultural cognoscenti demands that he look further askance at the endemic misogyny in Jamaican life – comeuppance is not equivalent to condemnation.

The most put-upon characters tend to be Glen Campbell’s middle-class incarnations. Few in contemporary theater have his assemblage of expression, comic timing and physical awareness. There’s something of an old-fashioned vaudeville master in the way his face registers new information, and his ability to mine an extra laugh from the audience by freezing his reaction. Ordinary dialogue comes alive from his mouth, as he punctuates his lines with whip-sharp swings between baritone braggadocio and fearful falsetto. The natural on-stage chemistry between himself and Camille Davis (an actress clearly committed to her craft) provide many enjoyable moments. The other performers lack the connection with their peers that underpins stage acting, and as such were unable to draw more than the occasional chuckle from the full house at Centerstage.

The production values are adequate, although the set could have benefitted from better use of levels and more varied placement of exits and entrances. Natural projection and standard bright comedy lighting suffice for the size and scope of the production.

Brown and Co. miss an opportunity to stitch the segments together by having one infidelity trip over into the next, the web of trysts and deception growing until it entangled all the players, climaxing in an orgy of revelation. The actual ending, while unexpected, is a cheaper satisfaction. And the uneven performances reflect poorly on the co-directors, Brown and Trevor Nairne. But if we are all players on the world’s stage, Love Games makes for a lovely game, indeed.