Theater Review: Jamaica Farewell - A One-Woman Tour de Force - Page 2

The answer comes in the form of a smuggling scheme: her employer needs someone to take one million dollars out of the country. He can get a visa and he’ll pay any fool willing to take the risk. Debra volunteers. She arranges to meet Jack for dinner, fabricating a “business trip” to Miami her boss is sending her on, and counting on her sex appeal to invite her to travel with him. The ploy works. Now she just has to make it to the airport and through security - with a million US dollars hidden in her bag! - and say goodbye to her family.

Underneath the comedy is depth of emotion tapped most poignantly in the scenes Debra enacts about her father, a man whose drunkenness Debra wisely refuses to use to blunt our sympathy for him or the strength of her love. When she declares, just before the short blackout that precedes the final escape story, that she’s an “expert at forgiving” her Dad, we understand the true cost of leaving one’s home behind, even if to pursue a long-awaited dream.

I saw the show with a mostly Jamaican audience and, at that moment, you could feel their collective memories come together in a shared sense of loss and bereavement. Such feelings ought to sober everyone with a stake in today’s debates about immigration enough to recognize that while dreams of a better life still pull many to American shores, great personal and social upheavals all too-frequently drive people away from their homes.

Under Monique Lai’s skillful, yet unobtrusive direction on an almost bare stage, Ehrhardt inhabits a cast of characters with humor and grace, taking her audience on an unforgettable journey through familial struggles interlaced with vignettes from the island’s own political and cultural past.

Whether imitating a minister’s fire and brimstone sermon, her father’s interminable drinking and gambling, her mother’s cheerful efforts to manage the resulting financial distress, (“It’s easier to vacuum in the corners if there’s no furniture”) or the CIA agent she dupes into helping her pull off an escape caper that brings to mind a low-tech James Bond movie, Ehrhardt’s portraits are crafted with wit and empathy, some more fully realized than others.

Like Sarah Jones’s much-celebrated Bridge and Tunnel, Ehrhardt brings about a dozen people to life. Unlike Jones, she does it without changing costumes or set. (Although, on the night of the performance I saw, I wished Ms. Ehrhardt had had a better fitting costume; tugging at hers to make it fit created needless distraction). Although this staging serves the linear narrative of the odyssey, it nonetheless puts a greater burden on the story itself to carry the drama forward judiciously.

Article Author: Kathy Jones

Kathleen B. Jones is a writer and former professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University, where she taught for nearly a quarter century. In addition to four scholarly books on feminist politics, she published one memoir, Living Between Danger …

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