Called “remarkable” and “sometimes hilarious”, 3 Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology (1977-1987), edited by York environmental studies Professor Honor Ford-Smith, will launch Monday.
Readings of short excerpts of each of the three plays, considered an intertwining memory, violence, creativity, belonging and dispossession during a ten-year period in Jamaica, will take place June 6 at 7pm, following the launch at Trane Studio, 964 Bathurst St. (north of Bloor St.) in Toronto. Finger food and a cash bar will be available.
The three plays are: Masqueraders by Stafford Ashani, Whiplash by Ginger Knight and Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine by Patricia Cumper, Ford-Smith, Carol Lawes, Hertencer Lindsay and Eugene Williams.
Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine is an adaptation of Ford-Smith’s collection of poems set in Jamaica and Canada, My Mother’s Last Dance (Sister Vision Press, 1996).
Ford-Smith is a scholar, theatre worker and poet educated in Jamaica. She is co-founder and artistic director of Sistren (Sisters), a theatre collective of mainly working-class Jamaican women that work in community theatre and popular education. She was also a member of the Groundwork Theatre Company, created in 1980 as the repertory arm of the Jamaica School of Drama. She moved to Toronto in 1991, where she continues to write, work in performance and teach.
To RSVP to the launch, e-mail 3jamaicanplays@gmail.com.