Pantomime
Switching racial roles...with so-so results.
Tuesday Sep 19, 2006
By: Gretchen Kalwinski
This two-man play follows Harry Trewe (a British hotel owner in Tobago), his black employee Jackson Phillip, and the tale of what happens when Harry proposes that they put on a play satirizing the Robinson Crusoe story to entertain the hotel guests.
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Derek Walcott is known primarily for his poetry, but in this 1978 play, currently produced by Pegasus Players, he fleshes out the implications of what happens when racial roles get switched. Almost the entire first half of the play is sucked up by Harry trying to wheedle Jackson into a role reversal: Harry will play (black) Friday and Jackson will play (white) Crusoe. At first Jackson wants no part, but once he concedes he throws himself into his role with such gusto that Harry worries it could be perceived as offensive, not "something light" as he'd intended. He pulls rank on Jackson, telling him to scrap the plan and get back to work, which Jackson takes as typical imperialist behavior. By that point, the servant-master roles have been effectively flipped and they begin to lash out at one another.
Problem is, when their interaction starts to get melodramatic in the second act, the high emotion isn't believable. This isn't because 1978 was so different from now: The themes are still important. But here they come across as heavy-handed versions truisms. The mechanism of "sage person of color teaching uptight Caucasian how to truly live" is such a cliche at this point that it seems like vaudeville.
The conventional direction brought little innovation to the table; maybe several decades ago the literalness of the script translated differently, but this production never rises above surface level. Walcott's script is intelligent and insightful (if a bit drawn out and thunderous) and the set design is good, if not inventive. Andre Teamer and Kipp Moorman (as Jackson and Harry, respectively) work hard with what they've got, yet their characters never quite evoke the intended response, and the wink-nudge ending doesn't feel earned by the earlier parts of the play.
Pegasus Players is to be commended for taking on serious social issues here, not to mention its admirable goal of filling the theatrical needs of the Uptown neighborhood. But the group missed the mark in "Pantomime," despite good intentions. Some inventiveness, nuance and subtlety would go a long way in polishing their next production.
Playing at the Pegasus Players; 1145 W. Wilson Avenue, in the O'Rourke Center at Truman College; (773) 878-9761; $17-$25. Playing through October 22, 2006; 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday.
