LESSONS LEARNED FROM EFFORTS TO BE RICH, YOUNG AND FAMOUS

By Margaretta wa Gacheru One lesson to be learned from the Dorian Production, to be ‘Young, Rich, and Famous’ staged last weekend at Kenya National Theatre, is that it can be hazardous to aspire to such a materialistic goal. Even deadly as one saw in the final moments of Derrick Wasswa’s latest production. Another lesson that might be wise for aspiring playwrights to learn is that it doesn’t necessarily pay the serve your production as both scriptwriter and director. That’s because every writer needs a second (or third) pair of eyes to critically appraise the writer’s work. Otherwise, they might discover on opening night that there are glaring gaps in the show, or loose ends that don’t get tied up or resolved or other issues like whatever happened to so-and-so who disappears without a trace. In Wasswa’s case, one has to wonder, what happened to the guy behind bars in the first scene? Was he left to languish in jail for the rest of his days simply because, after joining the military, he didn’t follow his commander’s order to shoot everyone he encounters in some village where terrorists are said to exist? What I learned from one kind-hearted cast member after the play was that the young woman Claudine, who’d come to help the man get out of jail on ethical grounds, was actually the baby Claudine, born to the rich and famous woman who died at the story’s end. Apparently twenty odd years had elapsed since baby Claudine was born to Clara, the young woman who’d aimed to be rich and famous, but died in childbirth. We can’t be sure who the father was. It would seem that Kingstone, the rich sugar daddy who had given Clara five million before he had her shot, was Claudine’s dad. It would also seem that Claudine was transformed from being a sort of social worker into the story’s Narrator. She’s the one to take us back in time via flashback to meet her mother, the young woman wanting nothing more in life than to be young, rich and famous. It doesn’t matter to her that she was disrupting another woman’s life, the genuine wife of Kingstone, Angelica. Clara had already let him buy her a fully-furnished flat where she stayed with her mum. He has even given her his credit card to go shop to her heart’s content. But the one thing that turns his love into deadly intent is her insistence on having the baby that he has insisted she abort, but she’d refused. That became his grounds for getting rid of her. He let other men carry out the deed and somehow, her baby survived. But that’s how fast one can lose their wealth, fame, and life. So the third and final lesson learned from Wasswa’s play is that it’s rarely a brilliant idea to create a complicated plot, then include lots of exotic, erotic dancing to story’s complexities with the aid of that kind cast member who helped me draw two family trees, one for Clara whose mom was Angelica, a woman whose lover had been Kingstone until he got involved with her daughter Clara. After that she became Kingstone’s accomplice in his scheme to get his money back and the baby eliminated. The other family tree was for Kingstone and his wife who’d discovered her man had left zero cash in the bank. She learned where all the money had gone. It is thereafter that she got involved in selling Clara an insurance policy that included a clause ensuring that, if anything happens to her, all her funds would go back to Kingstone. Okay, that’s a bit crazy, but if Clara saw through this scheme, it was already too late for her to change the insurance policy. She didn’t see what was coming. For in the blink of an eye, she got attacked and then, bang! She was dead. But that’s not the end of violence. One other person wanted revenge for the assassination of her dad. It was Claudine who knew Kingstone killed her real dad. She had never really warmed up to her step-dad Kingstone so she hired hitmen to polish him off. But then, at the last minute, she got cold feet and tried to stop his murder. When she got to the scene where the murder was scheduled, she tried to stop it. Instead, the lights went off; then we hear a shot, and we assume Kingstone was hit, but maybe not. If it sounds like an easy story to understand, think again Mr. Wasswa.