HEARTSTRINGS’S GMO BITES THE BIG MEN FROM BELOW (THE BELT)

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 2.7.23) Once again, it’s valid to say Heartstrings are brilliant storytellers. They combine scintillating comedy with biting satire which is the gist of GMO. In Get Me Out or GMO, Bernice Nthenya plays a 5-star prostitute who is so clever that the men she cons don’t even know she is a pro. She’s accused by her house help Nancy (Esther Kahuha) towards the end of the play of being lazy and not hard working. But quite the contrary! Her character Melissa is a beautiful woman who has a magical charisma that she uses to make men believe she’s the answer to their dreams. She has got the beauty, body, brains, and it is said she is brilliant in bed. But she’s also got a problem which we don’t fully understand until the very end of the comedy. We get an inkling of it when the video preceding the play shows her walking from one Chemist’s shop to another, looking for something. It turns out to be a do-it-yourself pregnancy test which looks like it registered positive for Melissa. The next thing you know, she’s with her sweetheart Frank (Fischer Maina), a chef who is thrilled that his girlfriend is pregnant with his child. Being an orphan who grew up in a children’s home, Frank is keen to start a family and give their child the best opportunities in life that he never had. But to do that, he says he needs money. So, he is off to work in Dubai and be back in a year. She begrudgingly lets him go. It looks sweet and straightforward. But then, another man arrives who lays claim to her pregnancy, especially after hearing Melissa’s baby is a boy. Wanyama (Arnold Savior), a sugar cane farmer, already has eight daughters and a wife. But he's prepared to cast them aside for a boy child and new wife. Then comes Kasyoki (Tim Ndisi), the filthy rich politician who carries his millions (money stolen from public coffers) around in an armored suitcase protected by a private security guard (Richard Macharia). He too is delighted to be the father of Melissa’s baby and easily forks out funds for the mother and child. In every instance, Melissa is chameleon-like in her ability to adapt to each changing situation. Her aim, as we now see, is to extract as much cash from these men as she possibly can. But the time for getting big money from these guys, (apart from Frank who’s struggling to survive in Dubai) comes when she meets them at her gynecologist’s office. Dr Ruth is in cahoots with Melissa to extract maximum in cash from ‘Lissa’s men. All in the name of ensuring the baby’s health, she’s billing Wanyama for more than a million which he can only provide if he sells his land, which he does. The politician has no problem paying up; but when Frank calls Dr Ruth from Dubai, the situation gets tense since Melissa’s there and doesn’t want Frank seeing her with another man. Her racket runs smoothly for five years. As the story fast forwards to when Frank finally arrives back after barely finding means to make it home. Wanyama also shows up, pathetic in his problem after selling his land and having nothing to show for it. And when politician Kasyoki arrives, we’re watching a combustible situation. It's when Melissa finally walks in that the tension is almost unbearable. She is now trapped like a rat. But here again, the girl’s genius manifests itself. Here were the three men she’d conned and extracted heaps of cash from. They’d never been together before, never knew the others existed, so the scene looked volatile. Preempting the accusations, apart from Nancy’s since she had started off the blame game, Melissa took the offensive. She brought to mind the Scriptural story of the woman ‘taken in adultery, in the very act.’ Jesus’ response to her accusers became the essence of her argument. He told them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8: 7) In this regard, she noted Wanyama’s infidelity, Kasyoki’s thievery of public coffers, and even Nancy for abandoning her son, Frank. But the show shocker was when Dr Ruth showed up blaming Melissa for sleeping with her spouse, the real father of the baby boy born five years back. He was the reason she’d wanted all that cash, she claimed. And in that moment, the boy walked on stage and the curtain came down.