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| Leon Morenzie, Dennis Hines, MadgeSinclair, Clebert Ford. (Photo: Freedman-Abeles.) |
Ti-Jean and His Brothers was the first new play to
be produced by Joseph Papp as part of his annual free Shakespeare in the Park series.
Written by Trinidadian Derek Walcott, it is a near-musical folk fable set in
the West Indies and with local music, dance, ritual, and costuming to highlight
its allegorical motifs.
Ti-Jean proved a heavy experience despite its apparent
superficiality; it was found to be abstruse, repetitious, and laden with an
encrustation of literary allusions and symbols that bogged the spectator down
in cerebration but rarely involved him or her emotionally in the heat of human
dilemmas.
The story is that of
a poor old lady (Madge Sinclair) with three sons: Gros-Jean (Clebert For is all
muscle, Mi-Jean (Leon Morenzie) is all brains, and Ti-Jean (Dennis Hines) is a
simple innocent. When the Devil (Albert Laveau) challenges the siblings to a
contest, each confronts him in turn. Gros-Jean and Mi-Jean fail are eaten by
the Devil, but Ti-Jean, because of his instinctual human qualities and
closeness to nature, triumphs.
The Devil appears to
each brother in a different guise, his appearance to Ti-Jean being that of an
English planter against whom Ti-Jean incites the Black victims of colonial
oppression to rise up. His victory is rewarded by allowing the soul of an
aborted infant, now a devil’s imp, to be born into manhood as the allegorical
representative of the Black man of the future.
To Clive Barnes this
multilayered allegory was “hard to take” as a work of theatre. More music might
have lightened the burden, he suggested. Julius Novick fond the writing muddled
and hard to follow, its life-affirming conclusion excessively “sentimental,”
and Walcott’s direction “neither imaginative nor subtle.” John Simon thought it
disunified, “lacking in poetic imagination . . . [and] heavily overexplanatory.”
All the reviewers considered Trinidadian Albert Laveau’s tripartite performance the best in the show.
Next up: Timon of Athens
