The Ire of Eire In Trinidad

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: PLAYBOY OF THE WEST INDIES

AUTHOR: MUSTAPHA MATURA

WHERE: LINCOLN CENTER, NEW YORK CITY

THE BOTTOM LINE: A classic of rural Irish life proves equally entertaining, if sunnier, transported to the Caribbean.

The great irony of colonialism is that occupied lands often tell their woeful stories to the world in the language of alien rulers. This is nowhere more true than in the realms of the former British empire. Artists know that ancestral tongues or patois, even when they survive, could not reach a wide audience, while English puts them on a world stage. When John Millington Synge wanted to portray hatred of England's dominance in his native Ireland, he nonetheless wrote in English rather than Gaelic. When Mustapha Matura depicts his native Trinidad, he uses English -- indeed, he has lived in England since 1961 -- although his plays acknowledge that it is the language of past slavery and present subordination to foreign culture.

In his most popular play, which is enjoying a sterling production off- Broadway, Matura uses as his model Synge's finest work, The Playboy of the Western World. The 1921 original was set in County Mayo, in Ireland's remote rural west. The rowdy, bloody adaptation is set in Trinidad's east coast village of Mayaro in 1950. The transposition feels natural, underscoring Matura's point that at some deep level all colonial experiences are similar. The language is strikingly different, less liltingly poetic than the Irish, but bolder and much bawdier. By setting the tale a few decades later, Matura is able to evoke a society in transition to modernism, folk culture mingling with pop culture, myth blending with imagery from the movies.

The story of Playboy of the West Indies is the same as Synge's. A young man wanders into town on the run after having killed his father. Instead of condemning him, men admire his virility and women court him. When it is revealed that he only wounded his father, they turn on him as a fraud. The adulation makes emotional sense if one sees parricide as a metaphor for rebellion against a political patriarchy. The rage at the hero's failure is a mix of thwarted longing for excitement and dashed hopes for social change.

Matura transforms the young man from Synge's scrawny and unlikely hero into a tall, well-built leading man, played with wide-eyed charm by the aptly named Victor Love. This makes his tale more plausible if less of a revolutionist's lesson in what Everyman might achieve. Gerald Gutierrez's cunningly coarse staging provides comic turns for most of the cast, notably Antonio Fargas as a rumshop owner and Michele Shay as a lustful voodoo practitioner.

The focus is the shop owner's daughter, trapped not only by place, time and economic circumstance but also by her gender. Lorraine Toussaint, a major star waiting for discovery, embodies erotic power and deep pain. The final words of Matura's play are lifted straight from Synge. Toussaint makes them agonizingly her own, proving anew that English is not just a cultural artifact but a potent instrument for use by any artist.