Ehrhardt’s new play is relatable ... and mostly true

Theatre is bouncing back big time after the trials and tribulations of Covid. A couple of years ago, stages were dark, but this past weekend drama aficionados were able to see no less than six productions in the Corporate Area.

Five of them included Jamaican Hustlers by Balfour Anderson (Green Gables Theatre); Pigview Heights by Patrick Brown (Courtleigh Auditorium); Skoolaz 3.0 by Barbara Gloudon and The Pantomime Company (Little Theatre); Once Upon a Watch Night by Basil Dawkins (Little Little Theatre); and Conartist by Douglas Prout (Johnny’s Place).

The five were all based on scenarios imagined by the playwrights; the sixth production was different. It was constructed from recollections of the playwright, mostly from her Jamaican childhood.

“This is my story...98 per cent true,” Debra Ehrhardt told her audience on Saturday evening.

Sitting in the living room of Regardles, The Manley Centre, on Washington Drive, about two dozen of us were listening to a staged reading by Ehrhardt and Christopher Grossett of the former’s latest play, Look What Fell Out De Mango Tree. Though both had scripts in their hands, most of the other elements of a full production were used – movement, dance, music, a set (a minimal one) and lots of emotion.

Props were mimed, costumes were not changed, neither were the lights; but that was okay, the story was the main thing. The product caused one audience member to state during the post-production discussion, “I could relate to it.”

Many in the audiences who will attend the play’s future stagings planned for Jamaica and the USA should be able to say the same. Essentially, the story is quite common – about a girl’s painful relationship with a beloved, but totally unreliable, alcoholic father.

It’s full of laughs and ends on a hopeful note, so it could be called a comedy. But there’s also poignancy, anxiety and many tears, and the feelings are all convincingly transmitted to the audience by the two actors.

Their natural talent, and no doubt because they are Jamaica-born and have also lived for decades in America, enables them to easily switch accents and manner of speech to portray some seven or eight characters. Time and place are also instantaneously, fluidly traversed as the actors move around the several chairs in the performance space.

As she announced at the start of the show, the story is Ehrhardt’s, and in addition to the father-daughter relationship, we are also told about her relationship with her mother, many men whom she deliberately keeps at an emotional distance, and with her son, the child of a short-lived marriage. The hour and 40 minutes or so of the reading is roughly equally divided between life in Jamaica and life in the United States.

Grossett was born in Kingston and has roots in Portland and St Mary. A family migration to New York City enabled him to attend the city’s Performing Arts High School, receive a BA from Hunter College, and graduate from the Juilliard School’s Drama Division. Over the past 20 years, he has performed at The Lincoln Center, The Syracuse Stage, The Nevada Conservatory Theatre, and in Jamaica, among other venues.

Ehrhardt is a frequent visitor to Jamaica, not only to present some of her five plays, but to work on her other major project, ‘What’s Your Story Jamaica?’, the island’s biggest storytelling competition. Now in its fourth year, the million-dollar contest will culminate for the year at the University of Technology on Sunday afternoon.

Before she went on stage for Saturday’s play reading, Ehrhardt told The Gleaner that over the past few months of the competition, she dealt with nearly 300 entries, winnowing them out to the final nine. She had high praise for the finalists and promised the audience to the finals an exciting event.

Competitors can submit only true stories, the power of which Ehrhardt firmly believes in. She told me that sharing stories “promotes understanding despite our differences, [and] is the foundation of building stronger communities”.

entertainment@gleanerjm.com