NO EASY WAY TO REBUILD HEARTSTRINGS

 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted April 16, 2022)

Making the best of a challenging situation has been Sammy Mwangi’s job ever since there was an exodus from Heartstrings Entertainment of some of his finest and funniest male cast members.

I loved his recent shows where his women actors ruled the stage in shows like ‘3 is a crowd’. But apparently, Sam is seeking to redesign gender-balance in his longstanding troupe, so he brought on board mostly new male actors for last weekend’s production of ‘Easy Way Out’ at Alliance Francaise.

In the past, Heartstrings’ strength was its cast’s cohesion and actors’ keen ability to play spontaneously off one another. That was cultivated over years, so it’ll take some time to see that intuitive edge reappear

In the meantime, Easy Way Out was all over the place, from the street to suburbia, to finally the village where the comedy erupted into a soap-opera saga of messy interpersonal relations.

There was no dearth of edgy topics tackled, especially by a trio of homeless shoeshine guys (Paul Ogola, Tim Ndissi, Fischer Maina) who talk about everything from poverty and inflation to how best to maximize their meager profits by charging whatever the Market would bear.

Two of the three (Ogola and Ndissi) are even prepared to keep funds that don’t belong to them after Joshua (Maina) finds a client’s bag filled with cash. Joshua has another plan, so when his client (Adelyne Nimo), a gynecologist, returns looking for the bag she forgot, he hands it to her intact thus endearing himself to her.

What we don’t foresee is in Act Two when the doctor invites Joshua to her home, only to inform him she wants him as her lover! He’s the one who raises that delicate issue of class. He points out she’s a high-flying doctor while he’s a lowly shoe-shine guy. That crossing of class barriers rarely if ever happens.

Now talking about the fluidity of class in Kenya today, she tells him she’s originally from Dandora, a so-called slum comparable to where he’s staying now. Her mother (Mackrine Andale) managed to get the family out of there, but only after her father fled the scene, leaving her feeling abandoned by him ever since.

Fortunately, before the scene gets too sober or romantic, the other two shoe-shiners swoop in ostensibly to celebrate the doctor’s birthday. But the act ends with their attempting to move in.

The tricky business of act two is when the doctor’s sexy mother shows up, only to corner Joshua. Now we hear a whole other disconcerting side of him. Is he really a Casanova, lover-boy? Certainly, the mom is a Cougar who preys on younger men like him. It’s an issue left unresolved at act two’s end.

Now in act three, Joshua has called the doctor as well as her mom to his rural village to celebrate his grandmother’s 102^nd birthday. By now the shoe-shiners are deeply embedded in the story, even as Paul has never stopped scheming, scamming, and taking short-cuts to survive and line his pockets. In the process, he’s made a mess of Joshua’s party.

But Paul has nothing to do with what comes next

The last half of act three is a ferocious shouting match, worse than the one in act one when Paul and Tim were blaming Joshua for being soft, foolish, and naïve about money.

This shouting match nearly killed the case for calling Easy Way Out a comedy. That’s because the doctor’s long-lost dad arrives on the scene and ends up explaining why he left the family unceremoniously. His story doesn’t tally with what Mom told her daughter.

Dad’s second wife, a long-time neighbor from their shared Dandora days tells how she hooked  the doctor’s dad. She was prepared to accuse him of philandering, just as her mother was trying to do. But his explanation for his flight, namely her mother’s loose morals and his finding too many indicators that other men had occupied his matrimonial bed, was why he had to go.

“And after the mom had left him, she decided not to let this good man out of her sight. That is how she’s got a child nearly the same age as Docter.

No jokes are available to break these inflammatory moments. One wonders all this can come to and end, given the show’s already over three hours long.

The answer comes swiftly, [but it’s not savory or sweet.] Mom says she’ll never allow her daughter to wed Joshua since she is pregnant with his baby.