'Golgotha' seeks injustice's international stage

A "revelatory" nightmare vision, Golgotha is staged as the dream of Kanua, a Kenyan journalist who is also called, paradoxically, "the mouth that ate itself." But if Kanua's reaction to the allegorical Kenyan history he creates seems ambivalent at times--a mouth that both speaks and eats what it says--Kanua's real-life counterpart, playwright Bantu Mwaura, would seem to have reason to fear his own words.

Written and produced for the first time at Kenyati University in 1992, Golgotha was closed down by government police, and its author was put on a Kenyan "black list." Harassed for his political activism and his unflagging efforts to procure civil liberites, Mwaura nevertheless continues his street-theatre productions in Nairobi. Because Mwaura is unable to publish or perform his dramas in the leading theaters of Kenya, director Amelia Shaw, DC '97, sees this Yale production as the beginning of an international effort to disseminate Mwaura's plays and their attending political messages.

Mwaura's script captures in poetry the clandestine violence of a government against its people. The predominant and ruling tribe--one of a dozen--controls the government and its institutions; in 1991, when the government wished to claim a disfavored tribe's land, it sent its police disguised in the traditional dress of the neighboring clan. Fomenting full-scale war and causing mass deaths, the government sectioned off the land and would not permit reporters to enter.

Mwaura rewrites this history through visionary and inspired use of local fables and Biblical themes, but goes on to dramatize it with dance and African music. Shaw's production of Golgotha opens against a backdrop of white crosses; on stage right are three Golgothan crucifixes, and proceeding to the left toward the throne of the Ogre, a mess of demonically distorted red crosses. Propped on his throne, the Ogre, played by Jane Chen, JE '97, wears a carnival mask, orthopedic shoes, and a grey suit. The play, which never restricts itself to strict correspondences between constantly-invoked Biblical themes and the onstage drama, revels in these multiple discontinuities of theme.

To start with, Golgotha is not merely a Biblical place, but also the name of each member of a suffering family. This trinity is composed of Gol, the husband (Nicole Caccavo, TC '98), Goo, the wife (Ami Parikh, JE '98), and Tha, the child (Chrisanne Wilks, CC '98). While Kanua, played by Fatimah Guienze, SM '00, seems initially to be entering a strictly folkloric world of ogres and demons, he in fact comes into a fiercely political and religious dreamworld. At any time the masked Ogre may be a demon from Kenyan mythology, the bloody Old Testament God, the devil, the voice of a tyrannical government--and sometimes all of these at once.

The alien, unfamiliar world behind Kanua's office is an otherworld--a place where culturally unfamiliar fables will act themselves out. In a world of incantation, paradox, and unanswered questions, Gol, Goo, and Tha play different variations on the same theme: how to escape Mwene. No matter if the demon is the comic-grotesque figure, who tries to eat the family but gets fooled by the wily wife to eat dogs instead, or the grotesque Old Testament caricature of God, commanding them, "The word of the day is obey"--Mwene's voracity is always inescapable. Echoing the age-old tyranny of religion and government, he proclaims, "One is either a God or a Dog."

But Kanua, as a journalist, and more importantly as a poet, takes the first step to reverse this course of entrapment and death. "History shall punish those that remain deaf, dumb, and blind," he realizes, and undergoes the transformation from "recorder" of events to an authorial "scribe," a prophetic voice

The relevance of the play's title nowhere becomes more evident than in the second part of Golgotha. The thematic crux is the Passion of Christ, his crucifixion, and Jesus' descent into hell. Although never explicitly mentioned, the silenced words uttered by Christ on the cross echo at all times during the play: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me."

Golgotha traces the overthrow of indifferent and often nefarious authority, of a God that at times acts more like His demonic counterpart. Blending the incantatory language of mass grief ("All my children have passed away") and starkly prophetic poetry ("You must cleanse yourself") Shaw's production counterpoints these with stunning music and the exquisite, fluid voice of Maiya Sykes, SY '00. A cast of equally brilliant and beautiful actresses, they command their bodies impressively through dance; through their acting, respond passionately to the call against silence before authority.