For the Reckord | Excelsior drama club 'Act' on their concerns

If you want to know what's on the minds of the members of the Excelsior High School Drama Club, you should listen in on their conversations. Club president Akaila Simms, a grade-11 student, told me that the members often talk about their burning issues from early afternoon when the club meets until nightfall.

But because they're in the drama club, they also incorporate those topics into stage plays and literally act on their concerns. The seriousness of the themes of four of those plays might have surprised the audience watching them in the Excelsior High School auditorium last Saturday evening.

Simms listed some of the themes as racism, classism, love and family relationships, health and hygiene. She added that generally, those topics were raised by club members in the context of their personal or school lives.

However, thanks to the inventiveness of drama club director and lecturer Joylene Alexander, those themes are treated more universally in the plays making up Saturday's Evening of Excellence, as the event was dubbed. The plays, which Alexander conceptualised and/or wrote, with input from her cast, are For My People, Run, Secrets and Infecti-Humans. Each about half-an-hour long, the works were originally entered in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission's drama competition.

UNTRADITIONAL PLAY

For My People could have been entered in the Experimental category, for it is not a traditional play with set characters and a coherent storyline. Rather, it is based on poems and published writing and is an amalgam of skits, monologues, dances and songs, all with the message that black people have suffered long enough and should now take control of their lives.

Some scenes show Africans being captured, transported on slave ships and working in the fields of their new lands. More modern scenes show a radio discussion about hair; a preacher rebuking the spirit of ignorance among black people; a man getting a history lesson about black inventors; and a girl getting her hair combed and asking her mother, "Why do we have to suffer like this?"

The second play, Run, which is even more experimental, is a dramatisation of some of the ways we are ruled by the clock. Throughout the piece, people run on and off the stage, chanting, "Run!" On a platform upstage is a 'minute man' miming a clock with its hands continuously turning. The play's frenzied atmosphere matched its theme.

Secrets is your traditional soap opera. It covers a very rough few days that Sana, an attorney's wife, goes through. Her husband, Douglas, is prosecuting her sister's boyfriend for murder, and the sister, Anna, begs Sana to intervene and stop the prosecution. Right after, in comes the women's drug-addicted mother, asking for money.

Sana refuses both requests, but when she exits the living room and goes into the kitchen, she conveniently leaves both money and Douglas' only file relating to the murder case on the table in front of her sister and mother. Naturally, the sister steals the file and the mother steals the money. Happily, Sana's clever questioning of the two while her phone is recording the conversations leads to quick confessions.

Infecti-Humans is a musical fantasy about rats who live in garbage created by humans planning to invade our houses. A little girl and her cat convince the rats to sign a peace treaty. She also promises to get humans to keep their environment clean.

The casts performed with energy and sincerity, apparently enjoying being on stage. That joy was communicated to and shared by the audience, and my thought that some of the actors might want to pursue careers in theatre was confirmed in one case.

Simms, who acted in all four plays, said that if her CSEC grades are good enough, she'll be at the Edna Manley College's School of Drama in September. She has already passed the audition.