A new play called "Such Good Children" is premiering tonight at the Bliss center for the performing arts. It's the first time in three years that the Belize theater company has had a chance to perform in a proper setting and the players hope to make the most of it. We visited for a preview last night and found a story loaded with explosive social commentary and a promising young lead:
Alfonso Noble Reporting
It's a scene that's designed to seem familiar but at the same time faraway, as a fast- living, gun-toting son gives his mother the real-time rundown of what it is for ghetto youths in 2004 while she tries to tell him, as all mothers must, to just put down the gun:
Actress
"Guns kill people. They kill the body of the person that gets shot but they also kill the soul of the shooter."
Actor
"Mom, I've told you already, I wont use it"
Actress
"Don't tell me fool. If you have a gun you will end up using it. Look at me and tell me: if somebody out there threatens you with a gun and you have a gun in your pocket, you will just leave your two hands on your side?"
Actor
"No I have to defend myself"
Actress
"That's exactly what I mean."
Actor
"Mom, if the next guy has a gun and I don't have, he'll shoot me anyway."
Actress
"He only has to shoot you if he knows you have a gun but he knows you don't have a gun he doesn't have to shoot you"
Actor
"You really don't get the sense mom, you think Belize is the same as it was when you were young. Mom these guys will shoot you if you look at them too hard."
Actress
"It's better that they start hanging again."
Actor
"Mom they don't catch most of the people who do the murders much less charge them."
The words are written by Kathy Esquivel who's also directing. On this evening she was trying to work out the pre-opening night jitters with her crew. She told us that the play starts with a video of four young children telling the camera what they want to be when they grow up:
Kathy Esquivel - Playwright
"And then he play itself tells us what happens to these persons. And so what we are looking at are the social, political and economic forces that are acting on these children that are preventing them from attaining what they hope to be."
And that trajectory of a life starting with promise and ending in violence was inspired by a true story:
Kathy Esquivel
"The storyline came to me when a young man I knew was shot. And he probably some paths he shouldn't have taken but I knew him as a much younger person. And I began to think what change that person."
And in this story what changed them is the corruption of poverty and powerlessness:
Actor
"You are acting so holy all of a sudden. You know what I'm doing a long time."
Actress
"Me knowing what you are doing a long time ago? What do you mean?"
Actor
"Mom you are not stupid. What kind of work do you think I've been doing all this time?"
Actress
"Like you've said: catch and kill"
Actor
"Mom, what does that mean? You know that I am not out there doing hard labour or chopping yards. Have you ever seen me come home with my clothes muddy. Look at my hands, do they look like I've used a machete before?"
Actress
"Well I've never thought about it but there are a lot of jobs out there."
Actor
"Like what?"
Actress
"Like to help carry messages and things like that"
Actor
"And you who says that understands the world so well actually thinks that those kinds of jobs pay enough to buy gold chains and nice tennis?"
Actress
"Boy you are trying to confuse me."
Actress
"No mom, I am trying to un-confuse you."
"You are just as guilty as me you are what they call it? An accessory after the fact."
Actress
"I can't believe you are talking to me like this. All while I've been trying to do what is right. And you will look at me and call me a criminal."
Actor
"Mom, I am not saying that you are a criminal you know. All I am saying is that you are a victim of circumstances. You are just a poor black woman trying to fight for yourself and trying to take care of your family. You see poor people like us don't really have a choice you know."
Actress
"That's just an excuse!"
And it's that conflict between moralities and modalities that informs very lively dialogue:
Paul Hope - Actor
"The dialogue on a whole is very believable, is very life centered, especially dealing with life in Belize."
For hope who inhabits the character like he's lived within him his whole life, it was a stretch to assume the personality:
Paul Hope
"In all honesty is very, very difficult because my real life character is not that character. It's very exhilarating to become another character."
And he gives an exhilarating performance, filling out the character with nuance, control and even the veneer of danger:
Actor #1
"Who are the greediest people you know?"
Actor #2
"Is this one of those trick questions?"
Actor #1
"No, straight up."
Actor #2
"The politicians they are greedy for themselves and the party they are running for so they could get our money so they can buy our votes so they can greedy themselves some more."
Actor#1
"You said it all there slick, you said it all."
It's a play that takes on those complex issues that are always beneath the surface of Belizean society and hope says it is an education:
Paul Hope
"You can just see are real life picture of what life on a whole is for a vast quantity of people in Belize."
But the playwright is not in that "vast quantity". So is this former Wesley schoolteacher qualified?
Jules Vasquez
"Whenever someone from outside a culture is writing about a culture its always grudged because no matter how earnest one's attempt may be to ennoble or elevate those within an oppressed culture particularly it is always because you are not us and you can't talk about us."
Kathy Esquivel
"Nobody is we. That would mean no writer could ever write about anyone but themselves."
And Esquivel has confidently written the story of others, a story that is told everyday, but now comes to the formal setting of the Bliss stage for the first time.
The show debuts tonight at 8:00 and runs until the end of the week.