Role reversals

PBRC's thought-provoking Pantomime

by Bill Rodriguez

PANTOMIME. By Derek Walcott. Directed by Donald W. King. With Mark Anthony Brown and Shenge Ka Phar. At Providence Black Repertory Company through March 25. Call 351-0353.

Racism and subservience, liberal good intentions and hypocrisy -- they all come under scrutiny in Derek Walcott's Pantomime. Yet leavening the heavy ingredients is enough good humor to make this production at Providence Black Repertory Company an entertaining as well as an illuminating time.

The two-character, two-act play takes its time examining in amusing and ultimately remorseless detail the relationship between Englishman Harry Trewe (Mark Anthony Brown) and his Trinidadian servant Jackson Phillip (Shenge Ka Pharaoh).

West Indian Derek Walcott received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry about mixed racial experiences, both turmoil and satisfactions, in his native Caribbean. He grew up mostly in Trinidad, but he set this play in the little neighboring island of Tobago, a prettier place farther removed from the troubles of the big island. That is just the sort of contrast Trewe hoped to find with his guest house. He got out of performing in music halls and bought the place in order to succeed at something he had, or so he thought, complete control over.

His factotum Phillip is supposed to be around his same age, in his 40s. They have both been through decades of trying to get along with people of the other's race and have settled into comfortable accommodations. But while former Calypso singer Phillip simply wants to get on with some repair work after serving breakfast, Trewe insists that they devise a skit to entertain the guests. He wants them to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, only with the Brit playing the cannibal and the Calypsonian playing the shipwrecked white man. Phillip's patience gets sorely tested by this frivolous behavior. He keeps recovering his good humor, but he does reminisce about when he laughingly plunged an ice pick into the hand of an East Indian acquaintance whose racist wisecracks wouldn't stop.

Although we don't get into fully earnest gear until after intermission, early on Phillip delivers a long menacing monologue where he speaks of wearing his white servant's jacket for 300 years, a shadow that a boss/sahib of any era can never shake off. Trewe's response then is to stop the play-acting, now that Phillip is getting too real about it all. We don't want, he says, to make the guests uncomfortable. Over the course of act one, Trewe cautiously tests the water of actual equality that Phillip has been taunting him to plunge into. But the closing line turns out to be Trewe shouting an order.

If Walcott didn't deliver more than the repetitious give and take of the first half, as a playwright he would be a better poet. But while the play as a whole could have been trimmed considerably to concentrate its effects, in the second half it blossoms fully. Just as Phillip tells his boss that "that stiff upper lip is going to have to quiver a little" if he is going to become the better person he wants to be, the mask of humor the playwright maintains slips enough to risk stridency by letting his characters get serious.

Under the direction of Donald W. King, who heads the PBRC, shifts in tone and tension helps keep us alert and interested. As the superior one, the servant, Pharaoh's character gets most of the best and funniest dialogue, which the dreadlocks-wreathed actor delivers with attentive wit. (When he dryly goes on about the glories of leisurely urination, he's hilarious.) Brown has a harder time as Trewe, at the beginning of the run not yet comfortable enough in the character to relax into a song-and-dance man who is kidding around at home rather than under the spotlight on stage.

It was an odd decision to give the Englishman role to an African-American actor. Doesn't that push the limits -- and the logic -- of color-blind casting? We are removed from the relationship and asked to think about rather than witness it, translate what is happening instead of feel it immediately. The fact that the play deals with role reversals is meant to make this casting a little joke, I suppose, but it's a one-note joke, like a pun. Now, if in addition the dreads had been atop a white actor, at least our spinning heads might have settled in a more productive direction.