John Ruganda

Perhaps a partial counterpoint to the idea that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Two of the trifecta of miseries besetting Wamala and his family in their wattle hut are those perennials, poverty and alcohol, but the third is pretty unique--the aggrieved sense that everything tastes like ashes possessed by the failed golden boy who's been down so long it looks like up to him to bring his kid a cheap bed and tell his wife he's sorry after he hits her. The second act turns into show more this psychodrama where Wamala and his wife Tinka act out the hypothetical reception of his big worthess idea on double-ended safety matches by a former colleague of whom he now has hopes of patronage, finding that it ends in failure and bloodshed, but it's uncomfortably clear how much of that is to be taken as potential or putative reality and how much just them finding another way to stab at each other--not that you have to choose, in the theatre, and I love it when actors act acting, as here, even if it feels a bit of a letdown when it unravels into fever dreaming in the third act. One thing, this acerbic, Brechtian (and Shepardian--weird shades of True West in the wrangling of the pairs, mother-and-son and then husband-and-wife and then mother-and-son again), clever and non-credulous play feels like it could never get onto the high school curriculum in the optimistic, religious, tractable, Celine Dion–loving Uganda of today--I wonder if the fact that it's there reflects a nation once in need of a national playwright and prepared to take anyone who accepted the job, or whether the sour glee on dispay here is still in tune with facets of the national consciousness that this mzungu can't see. show less