Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
by Marcia Johnson, directed by ahdri zhina mandiela
Theatre Direct, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
February 21-March 8, 2008
Binti’s Journey is quite a remarkable play. If it were simply an engaging story about a young girl growing up in modern-day Malawi, it would be noteworthy. If it were simply an effective play for young people about HIV/AIDS, it would be exceptional. Binti’s Journey, however, is both since the title character grows up in a country where in 1995 over half a million young people were orphaned by AIDS, a number that is difficult enough to grasp as a statistic let alone a fact of everyday life. In adapting African-Canadian writer Deborah Ellis’s novel The Heaven Shop (2004), Marcia Johnson has created a one-hour-long play for young people that has more substance and insight in it than any number of plays written for a supposedly adult audience. Under director ahdri zhina mandiela, Theatre Direct gives it a succinct, imaginative production.
The story is the opposite of a typical American success story. Binti (Jajube Mandiela) begins as the child star of a popular radio drama living a privileged life in Blantyre, Malawi’s largest city. Her mother has died and her father’s coffin-making business is booming because of AIDS but otherwise Binti has little knowledge of how people in the rest of Malawi live. Her father’s death is a blow, but worse is the fact revealed by her Gogo (“grandmother”) that both of Binti’s parents dies of AIDS. Now that Binti’s family has been “tainted,” her unscrupulous relatives end her career and separate her from her brother Kwasi (Sefton Jackson) and sister Junie (Lisa Codrington). Binti’s physical journey is to find her Gogo’s house. Once there she finds an orphanage for children homeless or parentless due to AIDS and undergoes a mental journey in which she redefines what “family” means when all around her are orphans and what “life” means when all around her have HIV or AIDS. Rape, prostitution, and the horrid myth that sex with a virgin can cure a man of AIDS make this a play “for those aged 10 and up,” though there are any number of adults who would have trouble facing up to the realities Binti’s world.
Despite this, the play is hopeful and uplifting. Mandiela gives a glowing performance as Binti and we sympathize with her every step of the way. Codrington, Jackson and Dienye Waboso are excellent in playing the large number of other characters. The director mandiela turns the simple but lovely set into a transformational space, not just for the actors, or for the story but for us as well. The play deserves the widest possible audience not just of schoolchildren but of adults who have just as much to learn.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-02-22.
Photo: Jajube Mandiela, Lisa Codrington, Dienya Waboso and Prince Amponsah.
©2009 John Lauener..
2008-02-22
Binti’s Journey