The First Stone: to rise you must go low
10 Oct 2022

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Cylla von Tiedemann

The First Stone is the opening production of Buddies' first full season post-covid. There was real excitement in the air, joy at being back in that sacred profane space—as interim artistic director Daniel Carter remarked afterwards, "It's so great to see buns in the seats"—so it was unfortunate that The First Stone turned out to be such a grim evening. It begins promisingly, with the land acknowledgment reduced to a projection and the large energetic cast of 15 trooping in to take their places. Tsholo Khalema (Lilies, Box 4901) seizes centerstage as a ghostly presence, an oracle caked in mud to announce that he has thrown the first stone with no idea of the damage it would do. And continues to do. His most epigrammatic lines, are projected (to evoke a Greek chorus?) alongside an ESL interpreter (Natasha "Courage" Bacchus) who looms overhead. Then Khalema fades into the background, sometimes lurking, sometimes as part of the chorus, until another speech at the finale.

 
But the projections remain as ponderous punctuation, introducing and explaining scenes. On a few occasions the scene introductions are helpful in establishing place and characters that are lacking in the text, but mostly they explain what we are about to see and hear, like chapter headings in Dickenesque novels. Sadly they also suck any dramatic tension out of the proceedings and the entire production goes slack as it meanders from one atrocity to another. And the atrocities are horrific. The First Stone tells the tale of a small village under siege by an unspecified army. The children of the village begin to disappear, kidnapped into a defensive army composed of child soldiers. Not only do they suffer terribly but they are also made to do terrible things and the evils of war, fascism and intolerance are on full display. It is shocking and occasionally rises to poetic sumptuousness as dance as communication and celebration is contrasted with dance as indoctrination.

We meet a village family as they go about the struggle to survive. Mom, a luminous Dorothy Atabong who is resigned to her fate; Boy, a playful and energetic daniel jelani ellis (Box 4901, speaking of sneaking) who is torn between childhood, being the man of the family and resolving his missing father issues; Girl, a stoic Makambe S Simamba whose childhood is ending because of her gender; and Baby, a doll who represents the doom that is all their futures. There is also Auntie, Uche Ama (Obeah Opera) who has a special connection of some kind with Granddad, Michael-Lamont Lytle, who is the general of the child soldiers. Granddad claims to be doing the will of God. Unfortunately it turns out that it is the will of the bloodthirsty god of war Arwa. As the characters interact their crucial lines are projected as sur-titles, line readings that the actors are not trusted to get across, and, again very Greek chorus-like, we feel the full weight of their fate. But we are also continually distracted so that we fail to develop an emotional connection with the characters. It is a Brechtian trade off.

Boy and Girl are kidnapped into the army, everyone suffers horribly, and then the dance metaphor is reintroduced as a redemption catharsis. Boy discovers the secret of forgiveness and after a quick therapy session Girl announces the key to the village dance, "To rise you must go low." Or, you have to suffer, and boy do they all suffer, in order to dance with joy. If there had been more dance and music, what there is is invigorating and driven home by the clockwork yet individualized chorus, the catharsis would have been emotionally satisfying instead of an intellectual check mark tagged on the end. There is a very powerful show on a very pertinent issue buried inside The First Stone. The book by Donna-Michell St Bernard (They Say He Fell) strives for poetry but gets mired in dogmatic dialogue that the projections emphasize, and while director Yvette Nolan keeps the backgrounds fluid and the ideas in the forefront, there is no cohesion to hold it all together. 

The big question is what this particular production is doing opening Buddies' season. A different venue could have provided a dramaturge and producers to help shape and theatricalize the thrust of a story that does need to be told. The First Stone should sear and shock. Unless one counts Granddad's occasional effete strutting as being closeted leading to fascistic sadistic tendencies, or the one chorus member who could be read as two-spirited (though that is never explicit or followed up beyond an extraneous fist bump from Boy), there was nothing queer about The First Stone. Not that there needs to be, the themes and context have enough inherent drama to drive a better production to become shatteringly relevant. Conversely, if The First Stone had trusted the one gloriously queer element of the production, it might have worked. When the cast raises their strong voices in fabulous harmony to the compositions by Maddie Bautista (Toka, xLq, Paolozzapedia), or fling themselves into the choreography of Indrit Kasapa (Toka,  Box 4901, Lilies, Hello Again, House Guests) the inexpressible—grief, rage, submission and resistance,  even forgiveness—is expressed in the defiantly queer form of song and dance. Then The First Stone would have risen from its lows.