By Michael Reckord, Freelance WriterBESIDES BEING playwrights with very different sensibilities, Roger Guenveur Smith and Anthony Wisdom are connected to the Caribbean in quite different ways. Two of their plays which I saw over the weekend reflect some of these differences.
Both plays went down well with their respective audiences, but what different audiences there were for Smith's Iceland, a dramatic monologue, serious in tone, and Wisdom's The General's Inn, a comic soap opera with a cast of seven!
The former play was produced by Calabash Literary Festival 2002 Committee and staged on Saturday night in a tent at Jake's Village, Treasure Beach, while the latter continues at Montego Bay's lovely Fairfield Theatre. The venues suggest the types of audience.
As an actor, Smith has worked extensively on Spike Lee projects, but he admits a penchant for writing and performing one-man shows like Iceland. Dressed casually in full black and swaying most of the time like a seaweed in a slow eddy, Smith performed to mood music by Marc Anthony Thompson.
The work is fundamentally a love story. It starts in Brooklyn and the tentative opening line is: It's just...ahm...love...it's just...love...it's... just love. Nothing special.
From Brooklyn, the actor/writer takes us on a long rhyming journey to the warm Caribbean, to a cold country, to family situations and into domestic fusses and problems.
He has been unfaithful. She had an abortion. They dance. He dives, figuratively speaking, into a volcano. The end.
The undulating underwater image Smith creates for us on stage matches his uncertain, shifting, translucent story. It's all very poetic, suited to its audience of, mainly, poets.
On the following night, at the Fairfield theatre, the audience was different. They had come to laugh and did laugh frequently at Wisdom's story of Jamaican-born, New York-based pianist Garfield Longfellow and his financial and domestic problems.
Last year's Actor Boy Awards' Best Actor, Lloyd B. Smith, plays Longfellow. The performer is at ease and confident as the one-dimensional character, an overweight, limping (he has a bad knee), quarrelsome man.
His New York girl friend and tenant, Roslind, is played less confidently by Aretha Ruddock. She is not bad, just inexperienced on-stage (despite having acted in four plays) and so doesn't quite inhabit her character the way the more experienced performers do.
Fabian Thomas (as Fitzroy, Garfield's son), for example, has the confidence which comes from his years of theatre work. Fitzroy is an inventor of wild and wonderful gadgets, most of which do not work. His latest is designed to assist men who are less than generously endowed.
While Fitzroy is a businessman - and dressed as such - his brother, Mackey (Donald Beckford), is a dreadlocked ganja dealer, quite unlike Fitzroy. Mackey does not change or develop, the way the more interesting characters in a play do; but he's not quite as stereotypical as Frankie Paganellie (Errol Smith), a thug. Frankie dresses in black clothes under a black leather coat and speaks with a thick Italian accent.
Harriet Longfellow (Stacey Sutherland) and her son Barrington (Nereree Edwards) complete the cast. They are the two of Garfield's family who live in Jamaica most of the time, but they fly up to New York when there is a danger of the family house being lost.
This possible loss, because of the money Garfield owes Frankie, is the theme (excuse?) on which Wisdom bases his loosely knit story. The tone of the writing varies from the serious to the comical and even to the farcical, at times. The director, Douglas Prout, is to be commended that he is able to hold the work together and make it work as well as it does.
One of the best aspects of the production is the set. Montego Bay Little Theatre Movement productions have a history of excellent sets and this one, designed by Prout and Peter Dodd and showing the Longfellow living room, is quite attractive.
