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Powerhouse performances in 'Not About Eve'

Published:Sunday | November 27, 2011 | 12:00 AM
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From left: Katherine Shields (Nadean Rawlins), Agatha Rochester (Carol Lawes) and Kimberly Shields (Lisa Williams) face up to serious family matters at the rooftop garden.
Katherine Shields (Nadean Rawlins) goes through her yoga routine in 'Not About Eve'.
Katherine Shields (Nadean Rawlins, left) and her daughter Kimberly Shields (Lisa Williams) have an intense encounter in 'Not About Eve'. - photos by Mel Cooke
Agatha Rochester (Carol Lawes, left) and her daughter Katherine Shields (Nadean Rawlins) in 'Not About Eve'.
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Reviewing 'Not About Eve' for the script's strength is a bit like ruminating if Usain Bolt is a good sprinter. It won the Actor Boy Award for Best New Play in 2006 and, as the programme at the final performance of a limited run last Sunday informed a fair-sized audience, was read at two events in the United States (US) earlier this year.

So the point is not if 'Not About Eve' is a good play; it is how good the performance was on that particular day at the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus. And it was very good, Carol Lawes (Agatha Rochester (Mama), Nadean Rawlins (Katherine Shields) and Lisa Williams (Kimberly Shields) working out three generations of differences on a rooftop garden in St Andrew.

For the record, 'Not About Eve' is about one day in two acts, during which a high-strung Katherine finally confronts her mother Agatha about the favourable treatment meted out to her brothers, at the expense of Katherine's education. In turn, Katherine's daughter Kimberly throws the rumoured treatment of her dead father into the family's public space, Mama also criticising her daughter for planning a party on the anniversary of the man's death.

Kimberley's lesbianism

In the mix is Kimberley's lesbianism, finally exposed to a horrified Mama, and Katherine leaving home in St Elizabeth with a man when she was a youngster. So although there are no men in the cast of the Brian Heap-directed play, they are not peripheral to the story.

'Not About Eve' ends with Kimberly leaving home and Mama staying, after raising the possibility of going to stay with one of her sons in the US, the lights fading on grandmother and granddaughter bonding over cups of tea, no words necessary.

It is the end of a production in which the trio's powerful performances, mostly so by Lawes with humour, anger, outrage and shock registered in good measure, kept the audience in the moment of the family's roller-coaster day of discovery.

- Mel Cooke