On Theatre (15 September 2003)

On Saturday past The Landlord closed. The play ran for a month, for sixteen performances, and audiences kept coming. Now this seems to fly in the face of current wisdom about Bahamian theatre. These days, productions are usually put up for what amounts to a flash in the pan, a blink of an eye: two to three days over a weekend. The most ambitious stay open for a week, sometimes two. The Landlord was a leap into the unknown, and it flew.

Part of the reason for this was the play itself. It's a very popular comedy, and every time it's performed it draws crowds. Part of it, too, was the buzz that was created by people who saw the play, liked what they saw, and talked about it: a review or two, some letters to the editor, and a fair amount of radio airplay. But the big reason, I believe, is that Bahamians are hungry for theatre.

I'm certain that many of us will be surprised at that idea. After all, there's a trend in our society to regard theatre as something that only white people, rich people, and students need; "true-true" Bahamians watch TV and go to the movies. It's certainly a trend that has for many years been advanced, consciously or not, by prominent members of the society, politicians in particular. Bahamians, we're taught, don't get into that artsy-fartsy stuff.

It's a nice myth. I just don't think it's true.

Now before I go on, let me get a couple of things out of the way. I'm a founding member of Ringplay, the company that produced The Landlord. I'm also a playwright, I've done some acting and directing, I run lights for shows, and my father and my husband and my brother-in-law and some of my best friends were and are theatre people. I have a vested interest in believing that Bahamians are hungry for theatre. But I don't think that my belief is simply a figment of my imagination. Here's why.

In the first place, the idea that Bahamians (and by that we mean, of course, black, grass-roots Bahamians) are too poor to go to the theatre, or that theatre is simply not Bahamian, is absurd.

It's economically absurd because it's the rare person who watches only ZNS these days. Most people who have television pay considerably more on a monthly basis for cable, or for DSS, than the cost of one or two theatre tickets. As for the movies, what we save on the cost of admission the movie company gets from us at the concession stand. And how many of us watch movies without popcorn and hot dogs to help us through the show? I won't even talk about what it costs to see international performers who give concerts here. I'm told that the fake tickets to see 50 Cent were $60 apiece.

And it's culturally absurd because despite our tendency to believe that theatre is somehow foreign to Bahamian culture, history tells a different story. Remember, we're primarily an oral society. Theatre is a fundamental part of the way in which we communicate our ideas to one another. In days gone by, schools and churches and yards and parks were theatres, and people came together on a regular basis to see what each other had to say. Theatre — the on-stage, people-in-the-audience kind of theatre — is intrinsic to Bahamian identity.

In fact, until this most recent generation, it has been impossible to dislodge theatre from that identity. When I was growing up, in the 1970s, theatre was everywhere. Every weekend brought with it a concert or a play or a recital of some sort. Almost every church had its own kind of performance; Sunday School presentations were high points in the year, and Christmas and Easter pageants were common. Most high schools put on annual theatrical productions; the Teacher's Training College had its own theatre group; and numerous community organizations were active. The biggest production of the year was the annual final presentation of the winners of the National Arts Festival, which showcased the best music, drama and dance performed by people of all ages throughout the Bahamas. When I was growing up, theatre pervaded every corner of Bahamian society, as it had done in every generation before. All of our world was a stage.

The strength of the Bahamian theatrical tradition is a truth that the rest of the Caribbean recognizes, even though we don't; Caribbean cultural guru Rex Nettleford has proclaimed that the Bahamas is without a doubt the regional leader in theatre. So what's wrong with us? Why is the success of The Landlord such an unusual thing? Where has our theatre gone? And where is it going today?

Some people argue that today, the true site of Bahamian theatre is Junkanoo. After all, Junknaoo is an annual spectacle of every element of the stage: music, dance, drama and the visual arts. Twice a year, every year, Bahamians, Nassauvians particularly, are exposed to this fabulous theatre of the street. Whenever Junkanoo travels, it's a show-stopper; people who have never seen it are invariably bowled over by it. This is where we invest our money, our time, our emotional resources. If we have Junkanoo, why do we need the stage?

Now there is a lot of truth to this view. Junkanoo is indeed a wonderful amalgamation of the performing arts, and it is a heady medium for self-realization. But that does not mean that Junkanoo is all the theatre the Bahamas needs. It's too exclusive, for one thing, too big-city, too inaccessible for many of us. And it's primarily competitive in its current state. In fact, as a friend of mine has pointed out, it functions more like big-league sports than like a cultural expression. The competition, and not the content, is the be-all and end-all, and after each parade, the focus of discussion is on who won and why, not on the ideas that were advanced on the street. The function of Junkanoo as theatre cannot meet all our needs.

Theatre, you see, holds a mirror up to society. In the words of John Russell Brown, who compared theatre to its other sister art form, film:

"A play uses the same elements as life itself; onstage there are real men, women, and children; there is talk, noise, and silence; light and darkness; movement and stillness. What is seen in the mirror may be unlikely or immediately exciting, but it will always be made of the same material found in reality, and it is experienced using the same kind of consciousness: it is sensed by every means we use in lived experience. There is nothing in our world — what we experience by being alive — that cannot be placed on a stage."

We are hungry not for spectacle, because Junkanoo provides that, or for action, because movies give us that, or even for excitement, because the foreign acts who visit give us that. What we are hungry for are pictures of ourselves.

Junkanoo as an expression of theatre, then, is not all we need; nor are television or the movies. If these are the only places we look for our theatrical fixes, we will continue to go hungry, especially if we are mere spectators and not performers ourselves. Television and film are not about us, and Junkanoo incorporates every art form but literature. We are hungry because what we take to be theatre is either foreign to our lived experience, or far, far bigger than life. Theatre in the twenty-first-century Bahamian society provides spectacle and performance rather than the communication of complex and subtle ideas. And it is for this communication that we are hungry.

Bahamians, you see, are theatre people. You can see it in the way that many of us speak; you need only to tune in to My Five Cents, where roving reporters point a camera, shine a light, and deliver stars to the world, to see the evidence of that. The proliferation of preachers, politicians, lawyers and talk show hosts provides more proof; all of these people are secret actors at heart. Even the conversation of women in the straw market or of men on construction sites is theatre. So why are we not cultivating this?

What we have created in this generation is a society of spectators. Because we have allowed our native tradition of theatre to become dormant, even to die, theatre it is no longer central to the lives of Bahamian children. Today, too many of the students in the Bahamas have not experienced the terror and the thrill of standing up alone in front of a bunch of people to speak lines they have learned as though they mean something. Is it any wonder that so many of our young people lack the self-confidence they need to make them honest, thinking, productive individuals?

Theatre is a mirror, theatre is the stuff of dreams. And to quote a line from one of the greatest Bahamian plays, You Can Lead a Horse To Water: "When a man dreams dreams, ain't nobody supposed to destroy them but him. If anyone gotta mess up it got to be him."

We need our mirror.

We need our dreams.