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by Deborah Asiimwe, Binyavanga Wainaina & Roland Schimmelpfennig, directed by Weyni Mengesha, Ross Manson & Liesl Tommy

Volcano Theatre/Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

September 29-October 22, 2011

“Not All Black and White”

Composed as it is of two of the best plays of 2010, Another Africa is a must-see for anyone who loves theatre.  Those who missed the plays’ premiere at Luminato last year must make sure not to miss them this year.  Those who did see them last year will want to see them again.  Not only are the two plays absorbing in themselves but combined they make up an exciting, thought-provoking double bill.

The two plays of Another Africa premiered along with a third play under the title The Africa Trilogy.  This triple bill commissioned and performed by Volcano Theatre had its own internal logic.  Shine Your Eye by Kenyan playwright Binyavanga Wainaina, that began the trilogy, was set in Nigeria and had an all-black cast.  Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig that followed it was set in an unnamed First-World country and had an all-white cast.  GLO by African-American Christina Anderson that concluded the trilogy has settings in both Africa and New York and a mixed cast of black and white.  The problem was that of the three GLO was the lest interesting thematically and the least innovative theatrically.  Dropping the play has made for a punchier, more satisfying evening. 

Another Africa begins with a short prologue called The Stranger by Ugandan playwright by Deborah Asiimwe directed by Weyni Mengesha featuring the entire cast, black and white.  It is basically a joyous choral welcome to the theatre and an invitation to open the mind to the images and ideas to be presented.  The precision of the choral speaking is impressive and by uniting the casts of the two plays, the piece underscores the unity of purpose behind the whole evening.    

Shine Your Eye and Peggy Pickit then follow in that order and resonate with each other to create a fascinating diptych.  The first concerns the effect of the First World on the Third and the second the effects of the Third on the First.  In each contact with the other world causes a character or characters no longer to feel at home in their country of origin. 

Shine Your Eye focusses on a young Kenyan woman Gbene Beka (Dienye Waboso), a computer expert and hacker, who goes to work for a Nigerian e-mail scam in Lagos.  She leaves her home because there people can only think of her as the daughter of a martyred political hero and assume that she will devote her life to carrying on her father’s work.  Meanwhile, she has met Doreen (Ordena Stephens-Thompson), a friend in Toronto, over the internet with whom she has daily video chats.  Beka, who is smarter than all her co-workers, wants to be appreciated for herself and her skills, but as the play progresses she finds herself faced with a dilemma.  Doreen, a lesbian who works in ethical funds, wants to sponsor Beka to come to live with her in Toronto though not necessarily in a relationship.  At the same time, Beka’s boss (Lucky Onyekachi Ejim) wants her to accompany him on a trip to negotiate the first oil well in Nigeria to be owned by Nigerians.  He feels her status as the daughter of a hero will help clinch the deal.  Beka’s escape from Kenya to Lagos thus proves to be no escape.

Wainaina has written the play in colloquial language that has the sound of poetry with the “Chorus” of Beka’s co-workers frequently breaking into song and dance.  Director Ross Manson seamlessly integrates movement, projections, animation and live video into the production to emphasize the tension between the bright contemporary veneer of Lagos with the ancient tribal ways that underlie it.   

Dienye Waboso is bright and sympathetic as Beka, a young woman trying to cope with the heavy mantle of history that weighs on her shoulders.  Ejim is authoritative and imposing as Beka’s boss, while Stephens-Thompson, replacing Karen Robinson of the 2010 production, makes Doreen seems a bit less flaky and therefore a more difficult person to refuse.  Muoi Nene is back as the ebullient Naijaboy, leading the chorus of Milton Barnes and Araya Mengesha in rhythmic song and hip-hop-like dance moves.  Shine Your Eye gives us a glimpse of a world in transition and the challenge to an intelligent women to find what place, if any, she can have in it.

The world of Peggy Pickit, though far removed from that in Shine Your Eye in distance, wealth and political stability, is also in transition, though on a more personal level.  Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig takes the familiar 20th-century dramatic subject of a party gone wrong and turns it into a savage critique of the naïveté and even the hypocrisy of First World attitudes towards the Third World.  Frank and Liz (Tony Nappo and Kristen Thomson, replacing Jane Spidell of 2010) are hosting a dinner party for their friends Martin and Carol (Tom Barnett replacing Trey Lyford of 2010 and Maev Beaty) on their return from six years of medical work in Africa.  The relationships within both couples have deteriorated as has the relationship of each couple to the other.  Martin and Carol have experienced a kind of horror in Africa that Western do-gooders like Frank and Liz ensconced in their comfortable ordinary lives cannot possibly imagine.  Life in Africa, that Martin and Carol call both “wonderful and horrific”, was spent in the midst of death, disease and the carnage of war.  They did what they could to help within the confines of their medical compound, but could do nothing to alter the political and economic causes of the devastated lives they saw.  The experience has made them feel like strangers in their home country and unable to relate to the happiness born of ignorance of Frank and Liz.

Meanwhile, Frank and Liz now regard their former friends with suspicion.  Frank and Liz have filled out in the six years but Martin and Carol both look too thin, prematurely aged and unwell.  Though the word is never mentioned, it’s quite clear that Frank and Liz fear that Martin and Carol both have AIDS.  When they learn that Martin and Carol both had affairs in Africa and now refuse to have blood tests, they treat their former friends as if they had brought some of the fearful abyss of Africa right into their comfy home. 

Schimmelpfennig focusses the two couples’ anxieties on an exchange of gifts.  Martin and Carol gives their hosts a human figure carved of wood that Liz, to their chagrin immediately names “Annie”, the name of the child Frank and Liz have sponsored in Africa.  In return, Liz gives her guests a little plastic doll for the real Annie named Peggy Pickit, part of a fad that has arisen in the past six years.  Besides the difference between mass-manufacturing and handicraft, marketing ploys and ancient images, the synthetic and the natural, the two dolls represent the opposite poles from which the two couples regard each other.  South African director Liesl Tommy has put a video camera in the African doll that broadcasts what it sees on the “mirror” at the back of the set.  It is absolutely cringe-making to see Kristin Thomson’s Liz enact several babytalk dialogues between Peggy Pickit and “Annie” that unintentionally reveal her own insecurities about herself and her values. 

The content alone is fascinating but Schimmelpfennig also uses a dramaturgical technique I have never seen outside this play.  Frequently the action pauses in mid-sentence or mid-gesture to allow one of the four characters to reflect on that evening’s happenings in the past tense.  Instead of a freeze that simply restarts, Schimmelpfennig has the action jump backwards before the last remark or gesture and then play forward again through that point until the next pause. 

On the one hand, Schimmelpfennig has invented his own type of Brechtian alienation effect so that we are always conscious that we are watching a play.  On the other hand, this technique underscores each of the various points when one of the characters’ actions trips a warning signal in the mind of the commenting character.  It is through these comments that we come to see how differently the two couples view each other.  As Brecht would want, we simultaneously look at the action in the present and the past so that as the content becomes increasing emotional our viewpoint becomes increasing rational.              

The technique demands perfect precision in timing and movement that is simply amazing to watch.  All four actors give outstanding performances.  Nappo gives us a man whose hearty jollity thinly veils his boorishness.  Beaty is an apprehensive woman who already seems on the verge of a breakdown when she first enters.  Barnett’s Martin tries to drink himself into silence to cope with the evening’s embarrassments, only to blurt out intimate personal accusations as he becomes inebriated.  Thomson gives quite a different performance as Liz than did Jane Spence in 2010.  Spence seemed brittle as if Liz had just finished having a row with Frank and were trying to hold herself together.  Thomson makes Liz seem a basically happy if shallow person who can’t cope with the increasingly disturbing revelations she hears.  Both approaches are valid and only point to the richness of the play.

Together the two plays create a fantastic evening of theatre and ideas.  Why does the play from an exploited country bubble with positive energy and why does the play from an exploiting country crumble with dark humour into paralyzing angst are only two of the many questions you may ponder long after you leave the theatre.  The two plays were must-sees last year.  Now in their new, more congenial format, they invite you even more forcefully to shine your eye on the new face of drama in both the developed and developing worlds.

 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (Top) Dienye Waboso (centre) and the cast of Shine Your Eye.  (Middle) Maev Beaty, Tony Nappo, Kristen Thomson and Tom Barnett. ©2011 John Lauener.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.