PANTOMIME
Court Theatre
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Walcott, the playwright and poet who won the 1992 Nobel Prize, sets Pantomime in a remote Tobago guest house run by retired English music-hall actor Harry Trewe (Greg Vinkler), who is composing a light musical-comedy version of Robinson Crusoe in which he hopes to star with his servant Jackson Phillip (Darryl Croxton), a retired Creole actor. When Phillip balks at the idea of “walking in front of a set of tourists naked playing cannibal,” a bolt of inspiration strikes Trewe. He suggests that they switch roles. He, the British white man, will play the savage Friday, and Phillip, the West Indian islander, will play Crusoe.
What begins in Trewe’s eyes as “something light, just a little pantomime” turns into a bitter indictment of the remnants of colonialism. Phillip launches into his portrayal of Crusoe with a strength and conviction that make Trewe uncomfortable. He ridicules Phillip’s performance and insists they forget the whole idea and go back to the way things were. Phillip observes that what he and Trewe have been acting out is the whole history of imperialism.
A much more obvious but no less powerful exposure of the results of societal inequities is Apple Tree Theatre Company’s hit production of Bill Cain’s Stand-Up Tragedy, which the Body Politic Theatre has imported from Highland Park. Cain’s play takes us inside a Catholic boys’ school on the rough lower east side of Manhattan, depicting the incredible odds the students face in trying to get an education while surrounded by the ravages of drugs, gang warfare, poverty, and family strife.
