A play with a considerable weight of importance and significance was recently staged at the National Cultural Centre. It was also one that was, to a fair degree, unusual.
This was I Am Us, written and directed by Neaz Subhan, produced and highly promoted by the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC). Subhan is very well known in Guyanese theatre as an actor, appearing in several productions over many years when he was active as a performer. He is equally well known as a playwright, with a number of dramas already staged, and he has achieved a National Drama Festival award. Subhan is also a foremost director and producer of several plays over decades. He has, in addition, been associated with films.
So, it was quite normal to see a Subhan play staged. There was nothing strange about one of these productions being important or significant, since Subhan made a mark on the Guyanese stage with his efforts to develop East Indian drama. This has been a telling contribution given his attempt to create a form reflecting the Guyanese Indian ethos, in addition to producing plays from India itself, thus widening the local audience’s experience in the Indian tradition.
He has done this with humour as in Choti Bakhu, with serious drama as in Tulsidas, with melodrama as in When Chocolate Melts, and in adaptations such as Dho Bhai. He has given tragic treatment to such themes as domestic violence and satirised the new technological age and its impacts on a rural Indian family.
However, I Am Us was a production of the Ethnic Relations Commission. This is not an agency known for any connections with drama. It is usually associated with politics and dealing with complaints, controversy and conflicts. It would be considered unusual for it to be producing theatre.
Yet, the drama I Am Us, introduced to the audience by Commissioner Barrington Braithwaite, produced and so energetically proclaimed and organised by the ERC is strange only on the surface. When more thoroughly considered, everything fits together. Subhan’s play is about politics. It deals with controversy and conflicts and issues of social cohesion in Guyana. Drama speaks to an audience about such things, and in this case, it used drama to address the issue of race and of the resolution of racial conflicts which is the major task faced by the commission. Furthermore, Subhan is a Commissioner in the ERC.
The play was deliberately written to dramatise a theme and a message, and this was obvious in its plot and structure. It attacks the most divisive and volcanic conflicts in the Guyanese plural society – race and politics – with a message of unity, fraternity and tolerance.
Two neighbouring families, one East Indian, the other black, are accustomed to living in harmony, friendship, and sharing the same space as if they were one family. It was jovial bliss until they held a birthday party for one of their friends, Defrietas, a Portuguese, played by Troy Parboo. A trivial argument over politics suddenly and explosively revealed that Surwah, played by Paul Budnah supported the governing party while his friend, Coalpot played by Gerard Gilkes, was a firm believer in the opposition. This blew them apart as arguments progressed, getting more vitriolic until it escalated to racial insults which became even more rancorous. The wives – Kunti (Ladonna Kissoon) and Norma (Simone Dowding) – were drawn in until the two families were rent asunder.
In keeping with the play’s symbolism, a fence appeared between them, dividing the once free and open yard space. After that, every little innocuous word, action or object easily became a noxious irritant, driving the families further to become two households split by race.
However, while their parents were at war, the teenaged son of the black family, Kevin (Yohance Koama) and the Indian daughter, Rekha (Malisa Mathur) remained close friends. But they met in secret and communicated at the risk of incurring parental wrath on both sides.
As a further symbol of the common national ethnic canker, Rekha was afflicted by occasional attacks of nara, which Norma had the skill to treat and dispel. Predictably, the girl had a severe attack one night, but this time Norma would not be prevailed upon to assist. Rekha was eventually taken off unconscious to the hospital where they were unable to cure her.
The play ends with her battling for survival in a hospital bed while Kevin takes the lead at home in berating his parents and their foes about the great harm they were causing in perpetuating this feud of Romeo and Juliet proportions. He confronts both sets of adults with the enormous gravity of their actions and how it could lead to tragedy in the threatening death of Rekha.
This became another dramatic device as Rekha’s illness became a national tragedy brought about by a national division. He was joined by the appearance of representatives of each different ethnic group in Guyana – Charles Adrian, Alana Craigen and Rovindra Persaud. Throughout the play, this was continuously marked by the fact that, apart from their Portuguese friend, Defreitas, their other friend, Fiedtkow (Romel Edmondson) was Amerindian.
Kevin eventually managed to bring the two sets of combatants to declare peace, in a moment of apology and forgiveness, and return to the oneness they had before the rift. As a further symbol of that, they took the axe to the fence and dismantled the physical barrier they had built.
As a kind of cementing of this renewed liberté, égalité, fraternité, dance groups appeared representing African dancers and drummers, joined by the Indian dancers of Roshini’s Jewan Ka Nritya Group with Feel the Beat Tassa Group, Indigenous dancers and Chinese dancers. Again, with some predictability, this pageant brought the drama to a lively, joyous end and carnival atmosphere.
However, the play withheld a common happy conclusion with the return of Rekha who is not present at the final curtain. The element of tragedy is maintained as she continues to lie in limbo on the hospital bed. That seemed a bit out of sync with the closing pageantry and celebration suggesting racial and human harmony. Probably there could have been less of a sense of deus ex machina at the end if the plot had given, instead, Norma, even in the face of enmity, going to the hospital and using her usual skill to save Rekha. That would have been a more convincing stimulus for the ending of the war between the families.
This observation is more important because the play turned from a drama to a lecture and a message/statement with Kevin, followed by three other “Kevins”, stepping forward and delivering an extended lecture on divisiveness versus harmony and a plea for national unity in a plural society. Perhaps something dramatic might have been more artistically convincing.
Rekha’s continued absence, however, and her state in the hospital could have been, in itself, a statement by the play of the current national situation, in which there is no fictitious happy ending. The frail girl’s precarious position was like the Sword of Damocles hanging over the nation. It was a reminder of the dangerous situation in which Guyana languishes despite euphoria and a false sense of prosperity. The thin hair holding the sword can snap any day, as long as the people continue their ethnic differences.
The ERC staged the drama in order to say something to the nation. The play worked very effectively with the large audience who saw it. They were very responsive and participatory in the theatre. This said that there was effective communication.
I Am Us went out with very candid revelations and statements which did enough to move the audience. It served the purpose as described by playwright August Strindberg in 1888, of “a Biblia Pauperum, a Bible in pictures for those who cannot read what is written or printed, and the dramatist, a lay preacher who peddles the ideas of the day in a popular form, so [. . .] the audience, without too much mental effort can understand what it is about.”
And so it was with the ERC’s presentation of Subhan’s I Am Us; so it was in resounding fashion.
