Roots theatre, the long-suffering bastard child of West African storytelling and English farce, has finally come of age.  And its adulthood is being ushered by one company.  Over the last few years, Stages Productions has used administrative and marketing savvy to turn their handful of contract players into highly profitable household names. Shebada and his peers work six nights a week and twice on Sundays, playing to full houses at Green Gables Theatre, as well as auditoriums, hotels and schools around the island, all at $1200 a head.

Given such compelling math, the literature doesn’t get much attention.  Stages plays are, at worst, thematically disjointed, sexually gratuitous, visually monotonous and overlong—symptoms of poor writing and direction.  But in Ghett Out, Shebada’s latest romp, the peculiar alchemy of script and improvisation, of audience and performer, and of comedy and commentary is one step closer to gold.

Written by Michael Denton, directed by B L Allen, Ghett Out takes place in a bullet-prone ghetto lane (you know, the kind that you’d be afraid to park a Mercedes), home to three tenants—illegal vendors Shebada and Barbara (Maylynne Lowe), and fallen Maude (Abigail Grant), who used to have a house, a car and a husband.  Her plight provides just enough story for us to enjoy the extended comic routines.

And what joy it is (if you can sit for three hours on a metal chair).  The Stages brand of theatre, at best, echoes vaudeville of a century ago, with its flat sets, broad types, dirty jokes and open invitation for audience participation.  Luke Ellington and Maxwell Grant play policemen Macka and Run Tings, handling hijinks and managing malapropisms with true bumbling perfection.  Ellington is the Abbott to Grant’s Costello, and like any comic duo they are at their best when misunderstanding one another.

The rest of the Ghett Out cast is serviceable—Abigail Grant, Junior Williams and Orville Hall stand up without standing out.  Maylynne Lowe is the latest high-profile crossover from the New Kingston theatre circuit, no doubt drawn by the fat paycheck.  Hers is the misfortune of being Powell in the age of Bolt; there’s room for only one lithe, histrionic diva on the Stages stage.

So we arrive where we started—Shebada.

If most of the company’s success can be attributed to business acumen, the remainder must go to the talent of their stars, especially one Keith Ramsey.  Pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell (incidentally, Jamaican-born) says the difference between mediocrity and genius in any field is 10,000 hours of practice.  As Shebada, Ramsey is racking up the hours, and all that practice has made him very funny.

One of the hardest skills for an actor to master is the spontaneous reaction; Ramsey does it effortlessly, creating on-the-fly responses to heckling patrons while keeping one ear in the scene.  Though young, his experience as a comedian shows in his intuitive knowledge of  what the audience sees.  The night the Gleaner attended Ghett Out, a patron made fun of Ramsey’s get-up as he crossed the stage.  Ramsey paused, without looking at either his clothes or the heckler.  He simply stood there, to the roaring delight of the crowd, and then resumed his movement.  Whatever Stages is paying him, they should double it.

The true genius of Ghett Out, and by extension the entire Stages enterprise, however, is the way it taps into our collective psyche.  Sure, a philandering husband is comedy, but in a country with so many single mothers, it’s also a tragedy.  Sure, a trigger-happy officer is funny, but in a time when our real policemen kill in cold blood, it’s also cathartic.  We don’t just want to laugh; we need to laugh.  In this way, Stages is almost providing a public service, a sort of ritual confessional where we can purge our sins and then take a route taxi home.

The play’s title draws from our de facto national motto, put simply by Run Tings—take what you can, and get out.  Roots theatre is more profitable than ever; by some back-of-the-envelope math, Stages pulls in a cool $1,000,000 each week.  As the audience got out of Ghett Out, turning into citizens once more, they had to pass the black Mercedes parked by the door.  Here’s hoping Stages helps us climb our mountain, instead of defacing yet another hillside.

The downfall of Karl Hart’s fourth play is that the odds aren’t long enough.  In Backstage, a fictional cast and crew take a show from script to stage.  We see a reading of the script, a number of rehearsals, some dressing-room undressing, and segments of the inscribed show, Just Soups.  But we never get a sense that the show is truly endangered.  It’s not that Mr Hart doesn’t provide obstacles, but that the obstacles are too easily overcome.  The characters worry, but we never do.  The whole thing trundles implacably towards opening night.  Given the many obstacles Mr Hart must have overcome to get Backstage on the stage, this is a minor tragedy in and of itself.

Backstage combines two potent tropes.  The first is the let’s-put-on-a-show plot device, which usually lends a natural momentum to the story, as time ticks away.  (Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney launched careers on these stories.)  The second, related trope is the use of a play-within-a-play, which allows for self-reflexivity.  (Hamlet recreates his father’s murder in a play to enrage his uncle, and Michael Frayn’s hilarious 1982 play Noises Off features three failed performances of its farce-within-a-farce.)

Backstage squanders the potential of both techniques.  One of the better scenes has the actors adjusting their performances according to the director’s shouted instructions.  A funny idea, but Mr Hart only finds a handful of punchlines, leaving dozens more to waste.  And throughout, we are left to guess, infer or remember how much time remains, when an overt indicator (a calendar? repetition?) would hint at impending disaster.

The real actors, left without guidance by their real director Nicole Williams (in her debut), do what actors do when left to themselves—anything they want.  Thus Brian Johnson reprises his over-enunciated anger from Glass Routes; Gracia Thompson reprises her affectations from Smile Orange; Peter Heslop reprises Peter Heslop from any of his last several roles; and Nyanda Cammock watches them while looking good.  This is mostly Ms Williams’ fault, not theirs.  In fact, all four are so naturally likable on the stage the result is still watchable.  Thompson is dignified, Cammock and Johnson have chemistry and Heslop’s face is a comic study.

So instead of the “double serving of exceptional theatre” promised in the programme, Backstage feels half as fascinating as it could have been, with missed opportunities in the script, direction and characterizations.  But there is yet a bit of drama to unfold.  Having thrown his work into onerous circumstances, and been forced to make difficult decisions (one performance was already cancelled), Mr Hart now has to watch Backstage fight to survive.

This has led to a number of entertaining, edifying productions—Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play, before that A R Gurney’s Love Letters, before that Yasmina Reza’s Art, and so on.  All famous writers, all celebrated works, all with established local actors (often the same ones).  Mr Heap’s latest endeavour, Appropriate Behaviour, seems to fit his pattern.  The scribe is Barbara Gloudon, whose deteriorating National Pantomimes nevertheless make her our most prominent living playwright.  The stage is stuffed full of talent, old and new.  What’s missing from Mr Heap’s criteria?  Oh, right.  The acclaim.

There are two reasons Appropriate Behaviour remains unburdened by recognition—one financial, one functional.  The script has eleven characters, making it unproduceable in the Jamaican market.  No one can afford to pay eleven actors, so no one has staged the play for two decades.  Now that Mr Heap has tried, he has come up against Ms Gloudon’s jellyfish script, with strands of plot and character floating about everywhere.

Appropriate Behaviour is set in a typical Jamaican office.  If you work in an office, you will recognize the narcoleptic environment, where management is overstaffed, the ledgers matter less than the lunch menu, and no one does any work (anyone who does is either promoted or ostracized).  But Ms Gloudon overpopulates her script—four grunts, two janitors, two consultants, a secretary, a manager and whatever Miss Patience is—without turning them into people or throwing them into a sustained conflict.

As a result, the characters talk a lot but the story goes nowhere.  Two co-workers get involved (against company policy), get spotted, but do not get uncovered.  Another two spend their time baiting a third about his sexuality, with no lasting consequence.  This might be chalked up to the playwright’s relative inexperience at the time, except Ms Gloudon’s last pantomime, Pirate Jack, was even more inchoate.

But the actors overcome the flawed writing.  Mr Heap gifted himself an embarrassment of riches (and a few embarrassments) in Appropriate Behaviour.  Here’s a quick rundown.  Nadean Rawlins, a Heap favourite, is so consistently compelling she should steal Nadia Khan’s Actor Boy statue as a public service.  Christopher McFarlane is the dramatic equivalent of a can of Red Bull—his explosive energy lifts the entire show, if only temporarily.  Marsha-Ann Hay, Maurice Bryan, Marguerite Newland and Melward Morris are all competent.

Rishille Bellamy-Pelicie and Jean-Paul Menou are good actors that choose inappropriate behaviours—she should walk more naturally and he should talk more naturally.  Althea Gordon-Clennon is the reverse—authentic, but not theatrical enough.  The cast lacks a unified tone; in truth, the whole show smells a bit under-rehearsed.

Which brings us to the main reason Appropriate Behaviour falls short—Brian Heap’s maddening unwillingness to extend himself.  His productions should be subtitled “Just Enough”—just enough set, just enough costumes, just enough rehearsal, just enough resources to make it through.  He seems more fussy about which play he directs than which direction the play takes.  The man is knowledgeable, tasteful, trusted and talented.  All he needs is Christopher McFarlane’s boundless energy.

Granted, he operates without grants on a shoestring budget.  All the more reason, then, to obsess over the particular shoestring.  There’s little excuse for a character anachronistically referring to using shillings thirty years ago.  All of the missteps in Appropriate Behaviour could have been reduced or eliminated with additional time and care.  Brian Heap, who loves theatre, knows that better than anyone.  The empty seats at the Philip Sherlock Centre must hurt him.  So, as the paying public, let’s lay out our own conditional love—if the writer has taken her time, and if the script has gathered followers, and if the actors are excited, and if the director has tried his hardest, we’ll make a go of it.

Appropriate Behaviour runs until May 16.

The Independence generation—Charles Hyatt, Louise Bennett, Trevor Rhone—had history on their side.  Fate gave them their mandate—the country was new, and we needed an identity.  They told us who we were.  But by the mid-1980s, what was new had grown old. The generation they inspired—Cathi Levy, Oliver Samuels, Owen Ellis—had their own ideas.  The country had changed.

This clash of ideas was the best thing to happen to our art since the British left.  Cathi gathered her Little People.  Oliver found himself At Large.  Not to be left behind, Trevor Rhone wrote The Game and Milk and Honey.

Now another quarter-century has passed.  Oliver’s posse is passe.  All that remains of their artistic explosion are a few scattered ASHEs.  New faces are here—Amba Chevannes, Michael Holgate, Teniele Warren—with new ideas.  The country has changed again.  Amba wrote Dinner with Eleanor.  Michael’s musical, Glass Routes, just finished its run.  Not to be left behind, Owen Ellis has written and directed Tick Tock.

Tick Tock is an experiment that eschews character and narrative.  Instead, an ensemble of twelve (hours on a clock?) plays different Jamaican archetypes while reciting long-form poetry.  Set in the ruins of downtown Kingston, in a nameless, placeless ghetto, the performers give voice to our most dispossessed fellow citizens.  The poetry examines the forces at work in their lives—the intimacy of poverty, the violence of despair.

This newspaper trumpets the nation’s murder tally on its front pages without emotion or explanation.  Ellis tries to provide both, putting faces on both the killer and the killed.  In one sketch, a street domino game turns ugly when a player snubs the local don.  The don responds by dragging the man into an alley and executing him, ensuring the respect and allegiance of everyone else.

Ellis captures the tense community of the inner-city, where your best friend, your ex-boyfriend, your mother and your rival are all within a rock-stone‘s throw.  Arguments flare and subside—another sketch has two women fighting over the resident casanova—but life goes on, as it must.

In these and other moments, Ellis engages, but Tick Tock stops short of success.  While the show is interesting to listen to, it is boring to look at.  The set consists of four battered two-storey facades, but they are positioned shoulder-to-shoulder in a line.  The performance loses one of its three dimensions for movement, because the stage has no depth.  The facades seem hastily painted and graffitied, without an artist’s eye for evocative details.  And Ellis doesn’t explore spatial possibilities—much more could have been done with the upstairs windows he built.

But we must distinguish between the experiment and the social scientist.  Tick Tock is a mixed bag (with a second half that needs reworking), sometimes compelling, sometimes not.  If you are a patron of the arts, go see it.  If you want the best use of two hours and two Nannies, go see something else.  Owen Ellis, however, is a great investment.  As the younger generation of artists takes over, expect more parting shots from this valuable veteran.  Remember, things won’t be this exciting for another 25 years.

Thus the artist thirsts for validation.  Affection.  Applause.  Awards.  Anything so she can believe in herself.  But there’s a thin line between believing in yourself and believing yourself.  Believing in yourself is thinking you can be great.  Believing yourself is thinking you already are.

Sabrena McDonald is one of the most talented under-30 thespians working in Jamaica, and one of the few capable of carrying a one-woman show.  But she does not carry Slim Actress, which had its only performance on Saturday night, and the reason lies in that thin line.

First, form.  A one-person show is almost impossible to pull off, because that one person must hold our attention, broken only once for intermission, for two hours.  There is no one to prompt a forgotten line, no one to rescue a flat moment, no one to elicit a raw emotion.  Failure is a clear and present danger.  Amongst the myriad terrors of performance, it stands alone—it is the King Kong of acting.  Like the beast, it is best approached with great care, great experience and a great idea (see Trevor Rhone’s Bellas Gate Boy—he was 62 and believed in himself).

Ms McDonald, brave as she is, lacks two out of three.  Despite the help of some experienced hands (Trevor Nairne lent direction, Michael Holgate lent movement), Slim Actress has no unifying theme.  The material is a motley collection of monologues, poetry and dance written by the artist over a period of years, some of which gathered local awards, including one from the Prime Minister.  Not too shabby, but not too coherent, either.  (Teneile Warren masked the arbitrariness of the pieces in her showcase last year by sharing onstage duties with a half-dozen friends.)

Second, tone.  Slim Actress is, as the program reminds us, “a celebration of 18 years as a theatre artist.”  Note to Ms McDonald: When you are only 30, do not celebrate the past eighteen years.  Work your ass off—humbly, preferably—and hope like hell you’ll be around eighteen years hence.  Nobody cares what you did at 12, unless you can make us care.

But there is much to like about Slim Actress, and the slim actress behind it.  For one thing, she almost pulls it off.  In ’99 and a Half’, an older woman wrestles with a real problem—whether her life qualifies for the local version of the afterlife.  McDonald is at her most relaxed, which allows her to find a comfortable rhythm—the words land on the ear like fallen leaves on grass.  In ‘Better Off a Boy’, a businesswoman shrugs off the self-imposed shackles of her father’s gaze and workplace testosterone.  McDonald is at her most honest, which allows her to be effective—the real-life loss of her father writ large.

Ms McDonald has range, which is shorthand for saying she can play both a fundamentalist and an atheist, both uptown and downtown.  And she has energy, which will mature into presence.  She is a highly valuable commodity—female, black, driven, talented—with all the right tools.  In other words, she is perfectly positioned to grow into greatness.  But, unless she puts down the Prime Minister’s award and reinstates a preposition, she won’t quite pull it off.