Differences?  Those three featured older women in trysts with younger men; Puppy Love flips the genders.  Dream Merchant and White Witch didn’t focus on the age disparity, while Me and Mi Chapsie and Puppy Love, as their titles foretell, do.  But collectively they beg a question.  Why are we, or at any rate our playwrights, preoccupied with this particular taboo?

Before we try to answer, let’s talk about Puppy Love and its fulsome foursome.  Oliver Samuels (busy working abroad for the past few months) and Dahlia Harris (busy working here at home—she was the older woman in Chapsie), portray Dick and Denise, a couple on the cusp of sixty.  They’ve been together exactly 30 years.  And they look it.  In behaviour and appearance, Dick and Denise are instantly recognizable as every comfortable middle-aged couple you know.  She has bridge on Saturdays; he has dominoes on Sundays.  They’re happily married, which in Patrick Brown’s world means they’re miserable.

Dick’s best friend, business partner and confidante is Harry (Earle Brown), whose 20-year-old daughter, Karen (Natalee Cole), has a jones for her Uncle Dick.  Her pursuit, and her uncle’s resistance, provide the plot and the punchlines.  It’s a fun and fast two hours, thanks to a controlled performance from Mr Samuels, agile direction from Trevor Nairne and astute writing from Mr Brown that keeps the audience one step ahead of the characters.

Mr Samuels enjoys an enduring popularity with the Jamaican people, as evidenced by patrons’ applause as the show began.  That appreciation must taste bittersweet to the old comedian, for it underscores the paradox of celebrity—as it liberates, it also confines.  The people who fill the Pantry Playhouse want to see the man from their television sets—the smiling man from Oliver at Large and those cheese ads—not the lonely hardworking husband, Dick.  So the former Pantomime actor aims for a sensible compromise in Puppy Love, delivering the dialogue on its merit, with only the occasional indulgence to his over-familiar persona.

Still, he has an intuitive sense of pace and enough experience to slow down potent moments.  Ms Harris makes a capable straight woman to Oliver’s funny man, suitably unaware of her double entendres.  Denise and Marilyn (her character from Chapsie) share an income bracket, a wardrobe and a lack of fulfillment, so Ms Harris borrows from one role for the other, using the same vocal register and class affectation.  Likely, this says more about the roles available to Ms Harris than about her creativity, because her choices in Puppy Love ring true.

Earle Brown holds his own as the distraught father.  Ms Cole, however, has the misfortune of acting opposite the veteran Mr Samuels, and her relative inexperience and inexpressiveness shows.  On the plus side, she provides an opportunity to admire the outstanding set designed by Patrick Brown.

Since Puppy Love has both unity of action and unity of place (the missing Aristotelian unity being time), Brown, a civil engineer by training, throws undivided attention to creating Dick and Denise’s uptown townhouse.  Kitchen, dining area, living room and den fit like jigsaw pieces in a palette of deep red, light green and beige.  Stairs evoke an upper floor.  Architectural angles imply a hallway, a patio and the rest of the house.  The space is aesthetically inviting, theatrically useful and, best of all, looks like people live in it.  Too often, set dressers underestimate how much junk it takes to make the fake look real—here, the bar has shelves, the shelves have liquor, and the liquor has empty glasses waiting on it.  Superb.

That’s right, you’re still waiting on an answer, aren’t you?  Our blend of poverty, paternalism and prayer might be a fertile environment for such relationships.  Taboos tend to thrive in poor, religious cultures.  Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that our theatre season traditionally begins the day after Christmas.  May December bring May-December once more.

Where there is an unexplained phenomenon, a theory is born.  And our country begs for explanation.  Geographically, we’re a dot, so small on most world maps that we could be mistaken for a gravy stain.  Our capital city, home to more than a third of our people, is a dot within a dot.

Ethnographically, we are the Colosseum.  Since independence some half-century ago, we have been manufacturing cultural luminaries—people with an international footprint, like Louise Bennett, Sonny Bradshaw, Trevor Rhone and Peter Tosh.  In the era of Usain Bolt, that footprint has only gotten larger.  How can a small, relatively young island nation have such a big impact on the world stage?

Thinking of the world as a stage is a good place to start.  In Aston Cooke’s world, to be Jamaican is to be a performer.  His new play, Me and Mi Chapsie, is a humourous treatise on that idea.

The chapsie is Donald (Everaldo Creary), a deejay in a popular inner city dancehall.  Popular, that is, amongst the blue-collar, red-haired crowd.  The woman he belongs to, divorced ad executive Ms Marilyn Simpson, lives many stone throws away in Norbrook, where they don’t really throw stones at all.  They meet when Marilyn gets invited by her co-worker to a party in downtown Kingston.

Despite the odds and the odd looks, they like each other.  They just don’t know how to show it without incurring suspicion and derision.  She uses her money, and he uses his… well, more private assets.  Marilyn, past her prime, worries he sees her as a chequebook, and Donald wants to be more than an appendage.

Within this context, Cooke, along with director Michael Nicholson, exposes Jamaican identities as the prepackaged behaviours that they are.  In the first scene, Marilyn’s domestic help, Cheryl (Carlene Taylor), shows her the walk, talk and attitude she needs to fit in downtown.  Because it is an act, it can be taught.  Keeping up appearances figures large in other scenes.  Marilyn is chastised by her co-worker, Janice (Marsha Campbell) about her new relationship—because to Janice, it doesn’t look right.  Marilyn and Donald fight over his clothes, now that his social position—his role—has changed.  “The important thing,” she says, “is to act the part, and look the part, and everyone will believe you.”

Last Sunday, when The Gleaner attended, an unplanned power outage vindicated Cooke’s viewpoint.  Thrown into darkness, leads Harris and Creary paused, then left the stage, waiting for the real world to retreat once more.  But a young man from the audience stepped to the front, where, dimly lit by a dozen cell phones, he entertained the rest of us with impromptu dance and rhyme.  He was rewarded with appreciative applause.  That’s what happens in a Performing Society.

Theatre can be a most unforgiving art, because it relies heavily on the physicality of its imperfect practitioners.  And when sex is in the script, as in Me and Mi Chapsie, even more so.  Dahlia Harris has some of her curves in the wrong places to be a cougar, and Everaldo Creary, though muscular, is a bit too small to ooze testosterone.  But what these two actors lack in looks, they account for with talent and chemistry.  They pepper their onstage affair with the kind of believable affection and bodily comfort that only comes from hard work and mutual trust.  That’s rare, and they deserve kudos for it.

Taylor and Campbell are also convincing, although their characters have less to do.  However, that doesn’t stop Danar Royal, as Donald’s best friend, Sean, from stealing most of the scenes he’s in, with his improbably slender frame, expressive eyes, and of-the-moment dance moves.  The party of five work well together—Creary and Royal are twice as effective when sharing the stage.

Technical aspects were less impressive, with a set that did not adequately differentiate a nightspot from an ad agency.  Light and sound design were lacking—much more could have been done to create the visual and aural environment of the dancehall, which felt empty and limp.  In a cramped theatre like the Pantry Playhouse, Nicholson should make patrons imagine—through the magic of the stage—what time, money and space cannot provide.

But it’s really not for a lone theatre critic to say, is it?  The beautiful upside to living in Kingston is that only the strong, the determined and the gifted survive.  If Aston Cooke plays his part well, long after the rest of the world forgets, applause will ring out from the dot in the dot on the map.  That’s what happens in a Performing Society.

Me and Mi Chapsie runs Wednesdays to Sundays.

Ras Genie has its laughs, including a clergyman (Rowan Byfield, treading worn ground) whose liturgical literature draws from scriptures old and new—i.e., the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and Beenie Man. It has a deliciously absurd idea at its core, swirling two Abrahamic faiths together for its title character, a Rastafarian jinni. And the cast tackles the material with gusto—Carlene Taylor, as exotic dancer Wingie, and Peter Heslop, as the eponymous Ras Genie, both deliver spirited performances.

But comic absurdity and attitude cannot paper over structural flaws. Ras Genie is unsure of its protagonist. More time is spent with Wingie and her desire to find love, financial security, or a way out of the ghetto. The title, curtain call and expositional passages, however, favour her protector, the Genie, who swings improbably between wanting to return to his bottle and itching to be free.

Traditional Greek theatre sometimes climaxed with a deus ex machina—a god who appeared, a little too conveniently, to solve unsolvable problems and untangle tangled plots. Modern audiences, paying for their entertainment, frown on such arbitrary endings. Ras Genie’s second act contains what we could call a jinni ex machina, who appears without explanation and whisks Ras Genie away. It makes you want to supply the stage with an extra bottle or two.

It’s a shame, because Andrew Roach sprinkles Ras Genie with the kind of cultural commentary emblematic of ‘roots’ plays and essential to keeping society healthy and its leaders honest. Believing he can’t return to his glass house, the Genie laments on his bad luck—he’s stuck in Jamaica, of all places, with “Bruce (Golding) and Portia (Simpson-Miller) and the sliding dollar.”  Some of the characters aspire to the perceived acme of Cherry Gardens and Norbrook. And there’s the aforementioned Reverend, quoting Colossians and Capleton.

Roach also has a keen ear for the vernacular of his countrymen, and an affinity for the plight of the common man (and woman), traits shared with luminaries like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Wilde and Shaw, however, never left their characters without arcs and their plots without through-lines.

Given its flaws, Ras Genie feeds the idea, popular amongst the cocktail crowd (you know, the ones who live in Cherry Gardens and Norbrook), that ‘roots’ plays are a low form of entertainment. It’s hard to disagree that our marketplace is stuffed with the genre—turn to today’s Entertainment pages—or that many are mediocre. But what this country needs is more ‘roots’ plays, not less. To hell with Oscar Wilde. We need to be drowning in indigenous drama, our lives relived for us with imagination and intermission. William Shakespeare was little more than a talented hack banging out commissioned plays for the English masses, and he turned out alright.

Ras Genie lacks the makings of great art, but not because of its roots or its aspirations. Director Dahlia Harris, playwright Andrew Roach and their cohort of thespians just need to try again, keeping in mind always the importance of being earnest.