SILVIA’S NEW PLAY A REVELATION

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (WRitten November 23, 2022) It was a revelation for playwright Silvia Cassini when she came across the hint that there had been witch burnings in the tiny mountain town of Triori, Italy, back in 1587. “I’ve always loved Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, but I never imagined I would find an equivalent story of my own,” the writer of ‘A Man like You’ told BDLife just hours before her latest play, ‘Speak their Names’ premiered last Friday night at Muthaiga Country Club. And like The Crucible, the pivotal issue is the power of women and the efforts by malicious men to quash that power through the combined means of the Church and the State. Cassini economizes on her cast in ‘Speak their Names’. Working with just five actors, she compensates for the fewness by selecting five of the finest actors in Kenya that she could have hoped to find. And of the five, it is Brian Ogola who embodies the spirit of the playwright as Cassini casts him as her mental mirror image. He plays the artist-writer, Federico Taverio, who struggles to bring out ‘the witches’’ story. But he does it by a mode of time-travel that takes him all the way back to 1587 when the Church conducted an Inquisition of women and girls who were arbitrarily deemed witches. Some were healers, others housewives, herbalists, or midwives. There were even little girls as young as 13 who were grabbed, abused, interrogated, and ultimately disappeared. In every case, these women had agency as they exercised their capacities to serve their communities and assert their power and positive influence. Cassini didn’t give us enough of a backstory on any of them, not even for Giovanina Ausenda (Nixsha Shah), the 13-year-old whose breakout role makes her a leading luminary in Cassini’s mind-boggling play.

But backstories are not required since this play is all about the revelation that comes to the writers as they both realize their importance in telling the women’s torturous tale. In the beginning, the writer Federico isn’t fully cognizant of the value of his role until he downloads the images in his head. That only happens in his dreams, when his characters come alive to him as he sleeps. To attain that somnambulant state of consciousness, he takes pains and also pills. One might think the process of his getting inside his dream state takes time. In fact, it does. Silvia, who also directs her play, gives her avatar, Federico, a magic cape which he wears when he’s either inside his dream or on his way there. Either way, he wears two sets of shoes, depending on which way he’s going, either casual when he’s at home, haunted by his beautiful wife (Nini Wacera) or covered in soft leather boots when he’s in his dreams. And because he’s so keen to discover how the story ends (since the characters that pop up in his sub-conscious mind apparently have agency of their own), he resorts to sleeping pills, pills that cause suspenseful concern since they might have dire side effects on the writer. But it is also the characters in his dream, especially Giovanina, the child, who compel him to come back into his dream so he can complete the project of writing the women’s story. Otherwise, the dark injustice of the women’s death and the truth of the Church’s cruel complicity and the State’s inability to stand up for half its population will be lost. They’ll be disappeared in the back alleys of history, which is where Cassini found the first clues that led her to dig deep into libraries and archives until she discovered possible connecting links leading to the women’s story. “There was a huge gap between the fact of the [Triori witch] trials and the way the witch hunt began,” Silvia told this writer. “The gap could only be filled with an artistic license to devise a script with my own imagination,” she added.

Fortunately, she was able to assemble an amazing cast. Both Martin Kigondu and Matthew Ondiege are marvelous in their malevolence towards the women they claim to be witches. Sharing misogynous attitudes that mirror many Members of Kenya’s Parliament in their backward stance against respecting women as equivalent co-partners in governance, they both wear the most elaborate costumes, illustrating their vanity and love of status. Ultimately, it’s Nixsta and Nini, playing the heroic martyr Franchetta Borelli, who shake up this story and inspire Federico to fulfill his destiny and immortalize the women by telling their tale and giving them an eternal life.