Mother’s Prayer by Ember Eve Productions – ★★★★☆
There aren’t many things in life that carry as much weight as a mother’s prayer. Words, spoken or unspoken that carry, hold and bolster dreams and act as a steady foundation as you find your feet. Affirmations, fortified by a heavenly power, that embolden and make us feel protected, coming from the purest of love, one incomparable perhaps to any other relationship a person can have. It’s difficult to put into words, but it is a palpable feeling. Its impact is heavy. It’s a feeling Ember Eve Productions managed to capture in their stunning debut play Mother’s Prayer, directed by John Pfumojena. A story of brotherhood, guilt, hope and the endurance of love showing up as grief.
The play begins with Pfumojena playing a haunting melody on an mbira; he holds the instrument above his head and he sings, beautifully but mournfully before he is joined on stage by the young men whose story we are about to bear witness to.
Corey Fraser, D’Andre George, Dumo Mkweli and Elijah Bangura double as writers and devisers of the show, and its characters Cookie, Edward, and twins Joshua and Bai respectively. They play four teenagers bound to each other by a kinship that unites stronger than blood. It’s a portrayal of male friendship unique in its tenderness; the boys physically embrace each other, physically demonstrating the ways they lean on each other, pour into each other, and ultimately need each other. It’s a version of masculinity often met with stigma, and so there’s something about it that feels radical without trying too hard to be. The relationship between the boys is the epitome of black boy joy, and each actor creates a character that feels familiar.
The play’s imagery and movement are remarkable. There are scenes and motifs that evoke and play on memory, and the mind’s ability to remember, a theme that runs through the play. The movement direction and choreography meet powerful writing to create moments that stay with the audience days after its showing. Incorporating dance, chant, call and response and spoken word poetry, the play ties sound and image to feeling and emotions, and the effect is surreal.
Cookie, lives with an image of his father that doesn’t meet him in his reality, Edward sees a reflection in the mirror that he is ashamed of, making his body feel like a vessel he cannot really live through, and needs to hide. Joshua and Bai share a life, a mind almost, and come as close to sharing a body as two people possibly can, which makes their eventual separation one that Bai cannot bear. Each struggle, and personal battle is portrayed with ardor and intensity, there is never a moment where the performers let their energy drop, you get the feeling that they might bleed the very blood of their characters. There is however, a feeling almost that the characters are caricatures of characters we have seen before in other plays about the lives of black boys; their struggles are real and deeply important and the performances earnest, but their personalities lack some originality.
The story is disjointed and non-linear. In fragmented scenes that switch between a dream Bai might be having, and a dystopian world where news headlines blur the lines between fact and an imagined future, we are able to piece together that the boys are living out versions of lives they will never get to live.
These are shards of a life once shared, visions of what could’ve been. They grip Bai, forcing him to remain in a state of purgatory, reliving a moment he is both regretful and thankful for, and Bangura brings this to life with immense feeling and surrender. He allows Bai’s pain to take over the auditorium as the truth becomes clear; Bai was the sole survivor of a summer excursion gone wrong that took the lives of his friends and brother. The play becomes a mixture of survivor’s guilt and Bai’s attempt to hold on to the bonds he will never fully feel again.
Mother’s Prayer is a heavy show, dealing with themes that carry weight and a heartbreaking story that encourages us to make the most of every moment, and to document them for posterity, and so it does feel slightly overwhelming. It does, however veer away from more stereotypical portrayals of trauma inflicted on the lives of black boys and men, and instead shows the breadth of what life and pain can feel like. The show is magical, and Ember Eve in their debut, create a production that deserves to grace more stages.
★★★★☆
By Melody Adebisi