Bahamian Theatre Abroad Part II

Mr. Mike Smith: I noted in a review it was said that “the Track Road crew are known for their untethered talent and merciless satire. They’ve earned a reputation for unleashing their eloquent wrath upon two-faced politicians, satin-tongued-preachers – hypocrites in particular, and intolerant attitudes in general.“Play Time,” one of their plays, the adult theatre treat of the summer at that time, may have indeed taken the conservative by surprise”, said the reviewer.“Aptly rated, see the show prance and abandon onto the tender corns of pomposity by the words and actions necessary.”That is quite something.

Dr. Ian Strachan: Very kind of you.I suppose the best explanation I could give is that I was a product of the 1980s Bahamas, and as you know that was a tumultuous period in the country. I remember distinctly being in school and the teachers’ strike. There was the Commission of Inquiry; and there was the time for a change election of ’87.It was an interesting time to come into young adulthood.I attended The College of The Bahamas, I started there in ’85, I got involved in Student Government, Zhivago Laing was a COBUS president, Darren Cash and then I followed.It was a channel of political education for me; when many people became disenchanted with the Progressive Liberal Party.Young people were in the streets demonstrating – students, and I think it was at that time that I decided that if I was going to write – I’ve always wanted to be a writer – that I wanted my writing to be political, to be of use and I wanted it to address the society in which we live and I wanted to challenge people and teach them.Satire just became the weapon of choice in a literary sense, I was always also a lover of comedy and humour, I grew up watching Benny Hill, Faulty Towers, British Comedy etc. also watching SCTV, which was Canadian – all these different shows and that affected my whole interest in humour, but also the absurd as a tool for – I think that if you want to get Bahamian’s attention, you have to make them laugh – they love to laugh and laugh at themselves.

Mr. Smith: But the interesting thing about Bahamians is if you are in a movie theatre, and there is something particularly sad or emotionally testing, they laugh.

Dr. Strachan: Yes.It is a defense mechanism.It’s a way of separating – I guess.I remember that very clearly too, I remember going to watch the “Colour Purple” at the Shirley Street Theatre and there was a scene where “Ceily” was hit in the head with a stone, or it might have been a scene where her husband, the character played by Danny Glover, calls her ugly and the audience erupts in laughter – which was completely inappropriate, but I think that’s a product too of just our colonial history and our unwillingness to deal with our discomfort, with such interior things being dealt with in a public manner, we try to diffuse it.But I try to use the laughter, to really draw attention – I think you can make someone laugh at something – it is a distancing thing, and if you can make them laugh at something political, some element of our society which you feel strongly is going the wrong way then you immediately give them distance where they can be more critical of it, even if they are guilty of doing the same thing.If you give them permission to laugh at it, then perhaps they will create, they will be less invested in it, more analytical. I guess that is why I have used humour in plays like “No Seats” and “Black Crab’s Tragedy,” and other plays that we’ve staged like Charles Huggins’ “The Hold Up”.I think that in The Bahamas too we are very much concerned with appearances more so than substance.That would be an accusation that I would make. And very much about the formality – just like people who call themselves Dr., but aren’t. They haven’t really earned their degree, but they like having the title.

Mr. Smith: So they go around parading as doctors.

Dr. Strachan: Doctor or Bishop, easy titles to gain when you don’t have a system of validation.So, I guess what satire does is it destroys all that – it says the Emperor is actually naked and you are actually looking at things, and sometimes you may go over board, sometimes you are even more harsh than you need to be, but you do it to drive home a point.

Mr. Smith: What has been the reaction of your audiences to such harsh satire?

Dr. Strachan: It depends on how invested the audience member is in what’s being attacked?Often the people who feel that their toes are being mashed are the ones who are most critical.But I find that the average person is able to receive what we do and we usually have a very good response.Again, most of our critics have been people who – I believe have a vested interest in preserving things as they are.That’s not to say that there are not reasons to criticize us, there is always flaws in thing humans put their hands to do, so certainly everything we do has flaws.But often the issue being taken up is not with the execution of the thing or its quality, but with the ideas, which doesn’t mean that you are getting at people.I have always written – and every time I wrote I’ve dreamt that this is going to be the piece of writing, this was going to be the play, or production that would finally make everyone stop and pay attention and tear down the walls, but in truth, you never do.

Mr. Smith: That is the motivation?

Dr. Strachan: That is the motivation. But you never get there.

Mr. Smith: Your vision for theatre arts, what is it?

Dr. Strachan: I would say that I have personal goals, but then I have things that I wish for the country.I think that as a country if you look at our history, at our economy, our educational system, at our proximity to the United States of America, at what modernization and urbanization has done to the Bahamian way of life, at what migrating from the Family Islands to New Providence has done to the Bahamian way of life, we are a people who are really are under cultural shock, in a sense that time honoured practices and customs and values have been sort of displaced. We are now in a situation where we are consuming a culture which we have no hand in creating, most of the cultural information we gain is from the United States (and Jamaica), it is being exported to us and we are importing it, we are not creating our own stories.And I think that any people that do not access to their own stories, must have trouble comprehending themselves and must have trouble conceiving a purpose for themselves and a future for themselves.And I think what has happened is – Rex Nettlefoot (the scholar from Jamaica) calls it a battle for space.That all Caribbean people are suffering from a battle, an inner battle for space, cultural space, in other words to mark out a space for themselves, because now you have the internet, television, cable, books, films, music – all of these things are coming and we are ingesting, they are telling a story, but it is not our story, and we are being marginalized – the Bahamian experience.My wish, my agenda, my goal – and I think this should be the goal of all artists – is to make Bahamians the centre of their cultural life. Make the Bahamian experience the centre of our cultural life.

Mr. Smith: I noted with interest that you only produce Bahamian plays.

Dr. Strachan: That might change, but I think it is important for us to tell our stories because they are not being told.I told my students that I would be on radio – and I told them to listen, I did a survey that I do every time I teach a class to find out how many of them know general things about their own history: when was the general strike, when did Black Tuesday take place, what is the significance of January 10th 1967, when did women get the right to vote in The Bahamas, and without fail, the students don’t know, they are in college and they do not know.

Mr. Smith: The sad thing I find is that they don’t know what happened five years ago.

Dr. Strachan: Precisely, and so my point is that to me the educational system – either they knew it and forgot it quickly because of tests, which is possible, or they are not being taught their own history.I know many of them told me that they were studying American history in school, which to me is preposterous.Not that you shouldn’t know about World War II, it’s of significance to everyone, but at some point you must learn your own history: when your mother got the right to vote – things like that.That dislocation, that alienation from your own experience is dangerous, it can have good effects in terms of producing adults who are invested in their society, understand the social, economic and historical forces, which shape their society and can pass on to their children a sense of pride in being Bahamian, and I think that is what we lack – cultural confidence, cultural pride, knowledge about ourselves, so I think that is what’s important – arts education is important for that reason and just pushing Bahamianess, Bahamian history, Bahamian culture is important, and I think that we are losing that fight and maybe we artists are not doing enough to organize, mobilize and apply pressure to this situation.