CHEKHOV'S PLAY KENYANIZED

bY mARGARETTA WA gACHERU (12.11, 23) Liquid Arts Players accurately entitled their last play ‘Fragments of Tomorrow’ since the production was filled with broken bits that defied a wholistic perspective on the message of the work, which was adapted and directed by the company’s founder Peter Tosh. What complicated our receipt of the message was the incessant shouting. The worst shouter of all was Dr. Astrov (Majestic Steve) who was bitter about everything under the sun or storm. A more dissatisfied man I have never seen in a Liquid production. He’s bitter about being old, about wasting his life, about it being too late to do anything to make a change, and just generally, he’s a man prepared to blast and bulldoze everything that comes in his sight. One couldn’t help feeling that Astrov belonged in a mental institution, and that by the end of the play he would have been taken there, but no such luck. Astrov’s problem seemed to be that his mind was filled with so many demons that he needed a Jesus Christ-type healer to cast them all out and send them into the sea to drown like the swine in the Biblical story. There are other shouters in the play, like the old man, Professor Bakari (Moses Ian) who is also an old man, shouting complaints interspersed with a few sane philosophical notions about being and nothingness (the title of the renowned existential writer, Jean Paul Sartre’s magnum opus). He is also bitter about life but he wasn’t on stage as much. Sadly, even the women in the play picked up on the shouting style, as if they wished to be heard above Astrov. Not all of them shouted. For instance, the professor’s second wife Yelena (Sophie Kendi) didn’t shout, but her very presence in her step daughter, Sonia’s (Catherine Kibuthi) life was painful to watch. The daughter was one more imbittered person who resented her father getting married again after her mother died. She was also unhappy since she had deep feelings for the doctor who wasn’t interested in her at all. I can’t tell you what Fragments of Tomorrow was actually about, only that ‘tomorrow’ didn’t look or sound like a very happy place. There was one message that did come through. And that was that in the present, one had better not waste a moment messing around with his or her life because in your old age, you don’t want to reflect back on it, (as Astrov did) and feel remorse for failing to fulfill your full potential when you had the chance. You also don’t want to reach old age and feel guilt for having done so many bad things that you never could apologize for, but didn’t even try at the time. The play actually brought up a number of philosophical issues, like contemplation of the meaning of life and death, of love and hate, and of happiness and sorrow. And on a more mundane plain, it also caused us to question why the play ended as it did. Forgive me for being a spoiler, but why did Astrov have to shoot Professor Bakari and his second wife, Yelena? I realize Tosh adapted Fragments of Tomorrow from Anton Chekhov’s famous play, Uncle Vanya, and perhaps that is how the Chekhov classic ended and he merely kept the ending as the playwright wrote it. But I think not. This is what we call artistic license, what Peter Tosh chose to do with the Chekhov ending. Why he chose to take the story in such a violent direction is something we should ask him about. Perhaps it was meant to expose the insanity of alcohol, since we all saw those fancy bottles filled with what we can assume were powerfully addictive booze. Or perhaps we were meant to see just how dangerous the mentally ill can be when they are let loose in society. Their minds are fragmented, blown apart either through actual bombs or other traumatic experiences that exploded the mental means the insane once had but now, no longer exist in the individual’s psyche. Either way, I’m glad Liquid Art made the effort to tackle these topics. Only that the director, in future, needs to ensure his cast doesn’t lose the acting quality of performance through shouting rather than sensitively developing their character’s identity from within and then cultivating their character from there. Chekhov also had one of his plays rejected, but a few years after that event disheartened the playwright, it was salvaged by Stanislavsky and it made a great comeback.