<b>✭✭✭✭</b>✩
<b>by Tawiah M’carthy, directed by Evalyn Parry
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
September 20-October 7, 2012;
National Arts Centre, Ottawa
March 3-14, 2015
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“A Second Outdooring”
In Ghana, if a child survives its first seven days of life, it is taken outside, given a name and formally introduced to the rest of its family and the community. This ceremony is known as “abadinto” or “outdooring”. In his solo play <i>Obaaberima</i>, Ghanaian-Canadian Tawiah M’carthy gives a fascinating account of what it was like to grown up gay in Ghana and then to live as a gay man in Canada. The story begins on the day before his character Agyeman is about to be released from a Canadian prison. The fact that we don’t know the charge on which he is held is one part of what holds our attention throughout his 80-minute tale. Agyeman tells us that when he leaves prison, it will be his second “outdooring” – this time not as what others want him to be but as himself.
Agyeman addresses us in Camellia Koo’s prison-like set. The two levels at the back are barred, but when Agyeman begins his tale the upper level lights up to reveal musician Kobèna Aquaa-Harrison surrounded by a battery of African instruments which he uses to provide live accompaniment to Agyeman’s words. As Agyeman, M’carthy wears his orange prison suit in an unusual way. Both legs are rolled up, but the top is unzipped – the left side worn normally, the right taken off his arm and shoulder and left hanging revealing a cut-off T-shirt beneath. This suit comes to symbolize the many dualities within which Agyeman is imprisoned and that he finally comes to embrace.
Flashing back to himself at age eight, Agyeman shows us his fascination with dressing up in his mother’s clothes. He already knows he is different from other boys and is taunted at school by one girl in particular for being an “obaaberima” or “girlboy”. By age eleven he has a privilege that gay North American boys don’t have in that other boys become afraid of him and believe he can curse them never to see their first-born children. Because of his interest in women’s clothing he is naturally drawn to the shop of Opayin, who is both a tailor and a dressmaker. The older man and Agyeman become friends with Opayin eventually hiring Agyeman to work as his assistant. His work includes modelling dresses Opayin has made for female clients. Gradually, their relationship becomes sexual but Opayin will only take Agyeman “as a woman” and wearing women’s clothes. In fact, Opayin has painted a picture of what he feels Agyeman really looks like, the woman Sibongile, in red high heels. Opayin tells him that when O’Nyame (God) first created a human, the human being was both male and female so that it is natural for a people to sense two sides to their nature.
At the same time, a young man, Nana Osei, from a wealthy family returns from abroad. The two are attracted to each other but it takes a long time before they acknowledge their attraction. They eventually become fast friends but it is Nana Osei who introduces sex into their relationship. The difference is that Nana Osei dislikes all the effeminacy that Opayin had encouraged and wants to take Agyeman “like a man”. Thus, it happens that Agyeman winds up alternately seeing both Opayin and Nana Osei, to the knowledge of neither. Even while still in Ghana, Agyeman is trapped between several dualities. His parents, completely ignorant of his sexual orientation, expect him to become a successful straight professional of some sort. Sexually, his gayness has two sides – the effeminacy he first felt and that Opayin encourages and the masculinity that Nana Osei encourages. He finds he completely fulfilled by neither one alone.
When he gets a scholarship to study law in Canada, he has to adjust to new, more complex conditions. It is his first experience of being a visible minority and that makes him want to call as little attention to himself as possible. He joins a Ghanaian Christian church and even acquires a fiancée Philipa, with whom he can speak Tshi, his native language, and whose presence helps soothe his longing for home. Her belief in no sex before marriage helps him keep his secret from her. Meanwhile, he has to still his sexual urges through hook-ups found over the internet, until he happens upon Elijah, who eventually moves in with him. It even comes to the point that he is out with all of Elijah’s friends, but the pattern he thought he had left behind in Ghana has just repeated itself in Canada as he alternately visits Philipa and Elijah and the strain increases in keeping the two ignorant of each other.
Director Evalyn Parry has underscored the parallels in M’carthy’s story with insightful direction. She associates the four opposing upstage doorways of Koo’s set with Ghana and the two opposing downstage doorways with Canada. Each doorway lights up under Michelle Ramsay’s precise lighting with an elegant gesture from M’carthy, so that underlying structure of his multiple dilemmas is made physically clear – literally, on the one hand this, on the other that.
M’carthy himself is extremely adept at supplying a distinct voice a gestural language for the dozen or so characters he plays. Strangely, when he plays Agyeman as narrator he seems deliberately to make himself deadly earnest. He is, in fact, like most actors, a person who needs to play a specific persona in order to bloom. It’s possible that the play would be even stronger if he were to make Agyeman-as-Narrator yet another persona.
Creating an exciting live soundscape that reflects the fluctuations of the drama is Kobèna Aquaa-Harrison, who plays a wide array of modern and traditional instruments like the balafon, seprewa, African and Spanish guitars, djembe and talking drum. His fantastic performance won him a Dora Award in 2013.
Buddies in Bad Times has seen any number of solo dramas about coming of age or coming to know and accept one’s sexuality. M’carthy’s tale is different because it adds so many new aspects to a common formula. Agyeman’s dichotomy within his gay orientation could be the source of a play all its own. Living a double life – straight to one person, gay to another – is his story’s most familiar element. It is altered by the additional pressures Agyeman experiences as a new immigrant and a visible minority. In speaking of his second “outdooring” Agyeman says that now there is no one name for him. All the names in the play, including “obaaberima”, are his names and in prison he has come to accept he is all of these.
One of the factors, if not the main factor, that makes Toronto an exciting city is its immigrant population who have come from all over the world. What Toronto is now is the sum of all their stories as they come in contact with all our stories. M’carthy tells a story unlike any you have heard before that gives us insight into Canada and Ghana and into certain pre-conceived notions of queerness in general. It’s an intriguing story beautifully performed.
©Christopher Hoile
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Tawiah M’carthy as Agyeman. ©2012 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.buddiesinbadtimes.com">www.buddiesinbadtimes.com</a>.
<b>2012-09-23</b>
<b>Obaaberima</b>