3 WOODEN CROSSES, A SEQUEL AS WELL A COWBOY WESTERN SONG

BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (composed June 18, 2023) If you are not a fan of Country music and don’t keep up with the current popular Gospel sounds, the play Three Wooden Crosses by Stewartz’ Players would be virtually incomprehensible. That’s where I was until I got in touch with Stewartz’s producer Joe Mureithi, who gave me a bit of the background on how Michael Mwangi had scripted the show that turns out to also be a sequel to Stewartz’s previous production, Now Let Us Make Man. Fortunately, I had seen that play and found it far more clear cut and straight-forward than the sequel. But just imagine if I or anyone else wasn’t aware that Number one, the play was inspired by a Country Western Gospel hit from 2002 and Number two, that the story picks up from where things left off in Stewartz’ previous play. Would they be lost? Maybe not, since the Narrator (Shadrack Nduati) in Three Wooden Crosses seems to spell out the basic structure of the play at the outset. He says the story will focus on the lives of three people. They are Jack (Juma Ali) who is a rebel, a rapper, and a would-be teacher, Waira (Fiona Ndungu), a peasant farmer who sacrifices everything to ensure her son Job ??(Dukealuu Gichana) gets a good education, and Tiana (Jane Oduor), who tried for years to escape the seemingly inescapable power of her pimp (Mugambi Ikiara). Nonetheless, there is a whole lot of back-story about the sequel that is invisible up to the end when we wonder, why did these three people have to die? And one other salient detail that might have helped us appreciate that this play is a sequel is the fictional ‘fact’ that the Narrator (who also plays a wise old guy) is the baby boy born to Jill and Dr Sam in Stewartz’ previous production. But if we had been fortunate enough to hear Randy Travis’s popular (among Country Western or Gospel music fans) song, we would have known right away that the preacher, the teacher, and the farmer are the ones who get buried under the three wooden crosses after their country bus skipped a stop-sign and get banged by a giant lorry. Only the prostitute survives and she’s not particularly happy about that. Meanwhile, we wonder why these three productive members of society had to be the ones to die? Was it because it said so in the song, and the singer was simply passing by a cemetery and sharing what he saw as he passed. We can’t help feeling there must be some higher significance to their death, a finer message than Randy Travis’ serendipitous song. That significance is yet to be disclosed, but one hopes it will all make sense when the third episode of their story about the battle between good and evil helps to resolve whether it is really death and the Devil that win the day in this proverbial war. All this is not to say that Stewartz’ theatre crew don’t have talent. They do. Gobs of it. For instance, the set design (by designer Brian Mandere) is the first one that I have seen in KCC in which the set actually extends all the way up to, and including the ceiling of the stage. He might have had a bit of assistance from Shadrack Nduati whose paintings were on display as we walked into the auditorium. Also, Jack (Juma Ali) didn’t want to leave jail when he was given a green light to go because he was busy teaching a lovely chorus of singers, and composing his own songs. One of those, which he sang (with a lovely tenor voice), got him his ticket out of jail. But he basically had to be pushed to get him out since he’d realized while in prison that his first love was really teaching. One doesn’t know when Stewartz came up with the concept of a theatrical trilogy. But whenever that happened, it suggests they were given to long-term planning based on their own script-writing. But what is essential when is producing sequels is for there to be threads of thought or several characters (or at least one) to provide the continuity necessary to actually call the plays sequels or essential parts of a trilogy. On the surface, I didn’t see one character, apart from Death’s ‘angel’ (Newton Mbonge) who appeared in both plays. Subsequently, I learned that Jill’s baby boy grew up to be Pastor Job, but this was not clear. So one hopes Stewartz can create their next sequel so the rest of us can keep up with your avant guard thought.