A 'Company Song' of transcendence
Published:Saturday | November 12, 2022 | 11:14 AMMichael Reckord - Sunday Gleaner Writer
"I guess the intended impact was one of transcendence." That was the reply from theatre director-designer Eugene Williams when asked about the concept behind his latest production.
The show, Company Song, based on four plays and 22 poems by Dennis Scott, opened on Friday at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts' School of Drama. It closes its two-weekend run on Sunday.
Williams' tentative "I guess" is appropriate. The source of artistic creativity is the subconscious mind, and no one knows precisely what goes on in its depths.
Happily, Williams' intention is achieved: the production is transcendent in that it powerfully lifts the viewer's imagination from present-day Jamaica to another time and place. Not that we are taken back to "the good old days". Unfortunately, as the darker pieces in the production suggest, there never was such a time in Jamaica as a whole.
Thus, in Scott's popular poem Uncle Time, which is dramatised in the production, time is portrayed as "cruel" and "black as sorrow"; "'an when ' im touch yu , weep." And one of the plays from which excerpts are taken, Echo in the Bone, is set partly in the days of slavery and shows enslaved Africans in a slave ship headed for Jamaica, and later, on the auction block.
The portions of the plays chosen — The Crime of Annabel Campbell, Dog and The Passionate Cabbage are the other three — are all tragic. The first is about a woman who murders two people, her son and his wife; Dog is about the abused "sufferers" in society; and in Cabbage, the main male character is both henpecked and cuckolded.
The play excerpts are melodramatic, but while many of the poems are also about pain and suffering — for example, Epitaph, about the hanging of an enslaved person, with its first line being, "They hanged him on a clement morning" — they are generally subtle. And some are about love and compassion.
They are also, on the whole, difficult. That' is why it was helpful that Williams both directed the play and designed the set. The backdrop's central image is a picture of Scott's face superimposed on large bits of broken glass, with a bird flying over his head. The walls around the stage are also broken up.
Here is Williams' rationale for the design:
"The set is intended to represent the fact that what you are presented with are extracts of the plays, and they are woven in a sophisticated and almost surreal way with the poems.
"And the focal point is the artist (Scott) and his literary and theatrical legacy, ever-present with its overarching symbolic motif of the creative imagination. I guess the intended impact was one of transcendence. Taking flight like a flock of birds."
With most of the actors embodying their characters, and getting into their skins, as it were, the acting is at least good. Some of it is excellent. Clear, expressive speech assists in character building, and it is the best I've heard in a School of Drama production for decades.
Williams explains, "I was very fortunate to have a group of talented and technically proficient students from second to fourth year. They loved what they were doing and trusted my madness as I continued to create (cutting and adding) material throughout the process. As [it] regards getting them to speak the language clearly and intelligently, that took detailed and concentrated work on a few of them. I am very proud of their evolution."
Their love is communicated to the audience, and we enjoy what we see on stage because of their love. We reward them with applause and laughter as well as with groans of sympathy. Paradoxically, one of the characters is able to get both laughter and sympathy — the betrayed Man (Alvin Wilson) in The Passionate Cabbage.
Other actors who deserve commendation are Jasmine Collins, for her role as the flighty Angela in Annabel Campbell, her Woman in Cabbage, and her powerful dramatisation of Guard Ring; Jordann Waugh, for her restrained, smouldering characterisation of Annabel Campbell; Sajay Deacon as her son/husband John; Jesse McClure as Stone in An Echo in the Bone and his rendition, with others, of the poems Uncle Time and Letter to My Son; and Abijah Warren as Mummy in Dog. Other audiences might see other actors in these roles as there is double casting.
John DaCosta's sensitive lighting and the stylistic, energetic choreography of Marlon Simms enhanced the show's visual appeal. Long-time costume designer for School of Drama productions Stacy-Ann Banton made both colourful and drab clothing interesting.
The production is being staged in the School's Dennis Scott Studio Theatre, and in his director's notes, Williams reminds the current generation of theatre-goers that Scott, who died in 1991, was a past director of the School of Drama. He adds that Scott was "a mentor to many of us who have worked with him as student and faculty. His particular vision of Caribbean Theatre and pedagogy is a legacy that continues to influence our own work as teachers and directors.
"I particularly wanted to introduce students to his legacy and to celebrate with theatre audiences a collage of plays known and perhaps unknown as well as poetry that they might find inspiring and refreshing on stage."
Ultimately, Williams emailed me after the show. He wanted the audience to have "an entertaining evening." Certainly, on the second night of the production, when I saw it, he succeeded.