By Michael Reckord, Contributor
The Xaymaca dance troupe during their annual season at the Little Theatre recently. - Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
TWELVE OF the more than 60 entries in this year's Tallawah Festival at the University of the West Indies, Mona, were staged on Sunday evening. Mounted at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts (PSCCA), the items included a one-act play, skits and one-person presentations.
They made for a long but entertaining show, with the EXED Community College's Performing Arts Department entries evoking the most laughter. From EXED came no less than six of the items, one of which kicked off the programme.
That work, 'The Ritual', a short dramatic play by Zeno Obi Constance which has become something of a Caribbean classic, was energetically performed by the all-female cast. There was occasional gabbling of words, but the audience forgave this as the young women portrayed the fears and problems of characters very like themselves. Specifically they showed what might happen if one of them got pregnant at 15.
Fiona Henry (Northern Caribbean University) was too melodramatic in her dub poem, 'Crying', and needed the restraint and control demonstrated by her schoolmate Fabia Phillips who followed her with Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise'.
The dreadlocked Philip Watkis (EXED) added a pleasing dimension to his anti-establishment poem 'I Believe' (written by Orville Hall) by strumming his guitar while chanting. Joan Andrea Hutchinson's popular satirical poem 'That White Witch Call Henny', got suitably hilarious treatment from Julia Gordon (NCU).
'The Jamaican T'ing', the second play - a musical, really - was written by NCU's Drama Club and its leader, Dwayne Cheddar, who directed the work. Also satirical, it pokes fun at the inability of the Government to fix potholes in the rural community of Border.
Music, mainly folk and gospel songs, accounted for about half of the running time of the piece, whose theme is working in unity. The audience cheered when, at the end of the lively, colourful musical, its two well-dressed politicians shook hands and agreed to co-operate for the benefit of the public.
Both Trudian Lowden and EXED's Sherene Davis allowed emotion to overpower diction as, respectively, they delivered the poems 'Stone Sermon' and 'Emancipate Your Mind'. But Courtney Wilson (EXED) had the audience in stitches as he dramatised his solo skit 'False Prophet', about a mercenary pastor who gets left by a runaway taxi.
EXED's 'Wacky News', a send-up of a TV news broadcast, was the hit of the evening. As the newscaster, Orville Hall (the author), played many parts and was the outstanding actor of the piece. Melissa Gibson, the literal-minded 'signer' (for hearing-impaired viewers), was equally hilarious. The sign-off commercial, a take-off of a popular ad, 'Nobody beat EXED. Nobady!' brought cheers from most of the audience, perhaps not the NCU followers.
Craig McNally's 'Adam and Eve' skit, an excerpt from his commercial revue, 'God Has a Sense of Humour 2', was a Kingdom Arts presentation and the penultimate one for the evening. It shows a dialect speaking Adam and Eve just after they have been banished from the Garden of Eden.
They fuss continuously, and tiresomely, but the piece has some funny lines. My favourite is an angry Eve's declaration, "I going back to mi moddah!" Adam's response is, "I am yu moddah."
The evening climaxed - or, rather, anti-climaxed - with EXED's laboured satire, 'State of Emergency'. The slow pace of the work picked up twice, when the court scene switched to, first, a hospital in crisis and, second, a school in chaos. Those two scenes were action-packed as the court scene was chatty.
Tallawah continues at the PSCCA until Friday. On Saturday, the winners will be announced in a brief function and on Sunday, starting at 5 p.m., the Best of Tallawah will be staged.
