AWARD-WINNING playwright Batsirai Chigama’s first stage play Can We Talk? was the last one to be staged as the evening play on Tuesday November 4 at the Almasi Collaborative Arts’ Inaugural Festival, Africa Voices Now!
And it provided more than entertainment as theatre lovers later shared that communication is an important aspect of family life.
A union of female DJs including singer and saxophonist Tina Watyoka provided opening entertainment.
“Can We Talk? is a play about three sisters who have come together because their elder sister is dead and they are trying to bury her, but she is refusing to be buried,” Chigama said.
“So they go back in memory to try and find what is causing her to refuse to be buried and they discover a very grave secret in the process.”
She added that the play teaches so many things including that in traditional Shona, if someone (a dead body) refuses to be buried, it means there is something heavy that they are carrying and their spirit is trapped somewhere in between the physical world and the spiritual world.
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“OK, so in trying to find why the sister is refusing to be buried, they discovered that their father was actually abusing her, which they all didn’t know all along.
“So for me it’s a play that teaches us that sometimes even if we have eyes, we don’t see, sometimes even if we have ears, we don’t hear because these are three sisters, four sisters actually including the one they are trying to bury, who lived in the same house, but the other three never noticed anything was amiss with their other sister.”
Chigama, who is better known for poetry books Gather the Children, published in 2018, and For Women Trying to Breathe and Failing, published in 2021, was last year invited for the Playwrights Conference, where she started developing the Can We Talk? play.
She was full of praise for multi-award winning actress Danai Gurira, the executive artistic director who contributed a lot to the successful run of the Almasi Collaborative Arts’ inaugural festival.
The stage play Can We Talk? had the cast Joanne C Tenga, Buhlenkosi Chinhara, Munashe Goromonzi, Catherine Douglas and Nancy Mutize aka Nasibo.