Enter Stages Productions, the powerhouse behind a line of smash-hit roots plays stretching from Negril to Morant Bay, including Bashment Granny, Money Worries, The X-tortionistz, Serious Business (now playing the North coast), Passa Passa Daily (now playing the East coast) and The Plumber (now playing in Kingston).  Their runaway success (three concurrent shows!), and their piles of money have made polite society grow increasingly impolite.

Gentlemen, dig your trenches.  The class war is on, and the opening skirmish may well have been February 9, when Simon Crosskill interviewed Stede Flash (co-director of The Plumber) on Smile Jamaica.  Abandoning journalistic ethics, Mr Crosskill asked Mr Flash whether he ever thought about doing ‘serious’ theatre, like Shakespeare, and capped a one-sided evisceration with the bullet, “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I see [a roots play].”

Maybe this explains the frigid rains ending our islandwide drought.

What Mr Crosskill evidently doesn’t know (and will hurt him) is that old Willie ‘The Bard’ Shakespeare got a bunch of friends together, built a theatre in the capital and wrote some raunchy comedies for the hoi polloi.  Titus Andronicus.  The Taming of the Shrew.  Merchant of Venice.  When he got rich, he stopped.  It took three hundred years for him to be reinterpreted as high art.

So Paul O Beale (writer of The Plumber), who got a bunch of friends together, built a theatre in the capital and writes raunchy comedies is in pretty good company.  All he has to do is wait three hundred years.

But don’t celebrate yet.  The Plumber is not The Comedy of Errors, just a comedy with errors.  And watching it invoked an entirely different popular theatre with a bad reputation—the American minstrel show.  The parallels are strong enough to worry your inner sociologist.

The Plumber is, ostensibly, about a policeman suspecting and then uncovering his wife in an affair.  Never mind that.  It’s really about bringing some familiar characters onto the stage, characters from prior Stages shows, presented so as to blur the line between person and persona—Garfield ‘Bad Boy Trevor’ Reid, Michael ‘Stringbeans’ Nicholson, Everaldo ‘Stamma’ Creary and Andrea ‘Delcita’ Wright.  These performers are not in the show; they are the show.  The play is best understood as a pretext for Stamma and Delcita to run through comedy routines.

The minstrel show was the same—with stock characters like Mr Bones, Mr Tambo, Jasper Jack and Zip Coon thrown into comic misadventures.  Originally played by whites in blackface, the art form became a lucrative income stream for black performers willing to blacken up.  (Stages Productions reportedly pays twice as much as other local troupes.)  The best performers earned celebrity with blacks, amongst whom minstrel shows were wildly popular.  They became inextricably associated with their roles, just as no one knows who Keith Ramsey is, but everyone knows Shebada (Stages’ biggest star).

Not enough?  Here’s more.  Both switch between playing off each other and directly with the audience.  Both entertain with sung comic verse.  Both employ sets that are little else than glorified backdrops.  Both rely heavily on physical comedy and one-liners.  Both use male actors for some of the female roles.  And here’s the punchline to the gut—in The Plumber, Andrea Wright, a beautiful dark-skinned woman, blackens up to become Delcita.

Is this a moral death knell for The Plumber, for Stages Productions, or for roots theatre?  No.  It is merely the teething pains of a recently reborn people.  Black minstrelsy thrived from the American civil war onwards, as whites found new forms of oppression, and blacks new forms of expression.  Our nation, in its latest incarnation, is not even fifty years old.  As plantocracy gives way to democracy, with much kicking and screaming from polite society, the hoi polloi are having a good laugh.

In time, the blackface will disappear, revealing the black faces underneath.  The best part?  Simon Crosskill won’t be around to see it.

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.