Play brings out sins and secrets of family life as ‘Hearts of Art’ returns

Mama Janel (Ellsey Aketch) with younger daughter Tina (Tracy Amadi) and dad (Job Wasonga) in Sins and Secrets. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU 

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

Nairobi theatre-goers are in for a treat this weekend when Hearts of Art returns to Alliance Francaise (after going silent for more than a year) with a brand new script entitled Sins and Secrets by the group’s founder Walter Sitati.

The ‘treat’ is not simply the story, which reflects so many facets of the challenges people face in Kenya — everything from corruption, nepotism and the gross inequality between the super-rich and the rest of us to the internal crises of families pulled apart by multiple social forces.

Sitati has also done an excellent job casting credible characters to play members of two families, one of which is well-to-do but hardly happy, the other lower middle class headed by a single mother who has struggled alone for years to ensure both her sons grow up to be well-educated, well-mannered and wise young men.

I don’t want to give away too many details of Sitati’s storyline. Suffice it to say, there is both emotional strife arising from family crises. But there’s also humour as characters struggle to resolve the dilemmas they face.

One of the biggest crises revolves around Janel (Beatrice Wawka) being tossed out of her family home by a father (Job Wesonga) who’s fed up having given his first born all the opportunities money can buy, yet she’s ‘blown it’ by losing a lucrative job he helped her get. Enough is enough, he’s decided.

It’s now for this spoilt young woman to fend for herself, something she’s never done before. Her survival strategy involves calling an old college friend Peter (played by Sitati) to help out, which he does.

But going to stay with Peter’s family is like going from the frying pan into fire for Janel. They are just about to go into ‘battle-mode’ as she arrives. The ‘enemy’ approaching is the absentee father (Kennedy Musumba) who left Peter’s mother Maria (Grace Waihuini) 23 years before with one son and another (Elvis Gatere) on the way.

The second round of fireworks begins with the father’s arrival. But this is also when the biggest ‘treat’ of all appears on stage.

Musumba hasn’t been a household name in local theatre circles for more than two decades, but the co-founder of Mbalamwezi Players was a trailblazing thespian who in his day made waves, not only as a producer-director but as an actor as well.

Musumba not only launched Mbalamwezi in the early 1980s with Eliud Abuto, who subsequently went on to form the Festival of Creative Arts which opens next Thursday in Don’t Let me Go! at Alliance Francaise, starring Robert Agengo, Janet Kirina, Martin Githinji, Justin Mirichi, Diana Mulwa, Nick Ndeda and Kirumburu Ng’ang’a.

Musumba and Abuto also launched the Mbalamwezi Theatre Awards which had a catalytic effect on thespians, theatre critics and even corporates like Jimna Mbaru who began to take more seriously theatre’s critical role in reflecting issues challenging Kenyan society.

Ironically, Musumba’s sudden and inexplicable departure from the theatre scene somehow echoes the role of his character in Sins and Secrets since Peter’s dad did a similar disappearing act, albeit for entirely different reasons.

The derelict dad in Sitati’s play walked out because he had another family somewhere which he apparently felt compelled to go and stay with. But it is after the other wife dies that he decides to come back to Maria. If he expected a warm welcome, he’s sorely mistaken.

Fireworks ensue as Maria’s sons, loyal to their mum, want this old man who has disrespected her and them to disappear for good.

Fine screenwriter