‘The Eleventh Finger’ performed better than it read

A new play by Janice Imhoff, The Eleventh Finger, was recently produced by SENOJ directed by Collette Jones-Chin and performed at the Impeccable Banquet Hall. It was a new addition to the corpus of Guyanese drama by one of the newer playwrights at one of the new alternative theatre venues in Georgetown. While it continued the long entrenched trend of dramatic realism on the Guyanese stage, it also reflected the overwhelming interest in social realism among the new playwrights, and in this case, an uncommon excursion into psychological interrogation.

A quite interesting drama, Testament by Paloma Mohamed in 2008 was actually a stage version of Janice Imhoff’s work – a testimony of cancer survivors. Dr Imhoff later began scripting her own plays, and produced a one-act drama, Ms Edwards in 2011. This now places her among the new playwrights who have gone into full-length production with an experienced director-designer Collette Jones-Chin staging The Eleventh Finger at this unconventional location.

It was an addition to the going tendency of dramatic realism, but not a popular play.