Favourable verdict for ‘Guilty with Explanation’

The latest Patrick Brown comedy, Guilty with Explanation, got a favourable verdict at its matinee staging on Saturday at the Courtleigh Auditorium, New Kingston. Judging from the enthusiastic applause and laughter throughout the show, the jury – the audience – found it hilarious.

“Excellent,” was the reply a patron gave to one of the producers asking his opinion of the play as the audience for the first of the evening’s two shows was leaving. “I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time.”

The playwright would’ve been pleased with that response. It was clear that he wrote in order to get laughs from lights up to curtain call. He peppers the script with witty dialogue even in the most serious situations. In fact, jokes continue even while one character is threatening suicide and, later, after another character might have died.

It’s the sort of play that invites a re-examination of the Jamaican saying, “Tek bad s’inting mek laugh”. It means that if by chance we find ourselves in an unpleasant situation, we should look for the silver lining and the humour in it.

As many playwrights do, Brown starts by putting his characters in a bad situation. This is a standard approach, for plays are generally about problems which get solved or resolved. Lakeisha Ellison plays Sophie Johnson, a woman who suspects that her husband, Sean (Tesfa Edwards), is cheating on her, perhaps with several women. And Oliver Samuels plays her equally suspicious father in the three-hander.

Brown writes a plot-driven play, and because he is a very talented, very experienced writer, he gets the result he wants – a laugh-a-minute comedy. However, to get that, he twists the story into unrealistic knots. But he’s in good company. Shakespeare’s comedies do the same thing.

Revealing the twists in Brown’s tale would be unfair to both the production and the potential viewer, so here’s a summary of the story’s set-up. It opens on an attractive, but curiously designed space, with living-room and dining-room furniture and an exercise machine right beside the fridge and kitchen.

Sophie, a pretty, young woman, is exercising with hand weights in the tiny space between ‘fridge and the exercise machine. This is an example of the visual humour of the play.

Her objective, we later hear, is to get her husband to show more interest in her body, and take her out occasionally. So why does she eat doughnuts during the workout? It’s to get the energy to continue, she explains, in a typical example of Brown’s humour.

Her father is living with her because he, too, is unhappy with his spouse. He suspects that she, too, might be unfaithful.

When the seldom-at-home Sean comes in, we hear that the cement company where he’s a manager has kilns which continually break down and need his personal attention. He gets phone calls he has to take in an adjoining room and cards signed with terms of love, but he insists that he is not cheating.

Problems escalate for Sophie and Sean, hence, among other things, the issues surrounding suicide. But the incidents are joke-filled, so it’s impossible to take them seriously. We have to believe the playwright doesn’t want us to.

We never see Sophie’s mother and only hear about her from her dad. Since his charges against her are refuted by Sophie, we can’t be sure if they are genuine.

His supposed problems never escalate and in fact seem to vanish into thin air when Sean and Sophie’s situation is resolved in the end. Yes, this is a comedy with a happy ending, and loads of fun leading up to it.

Samuels, who has been entertaining audiences in Jamaica and abroad for decades, hasn’t lost his comic appeal. After the curtain-call, he addressed the audience, thanking us for our continued support and informing us that Ellison and Edwards are currently part of his comedy team.

He said that Ellison had been with the team (which had included the recently deceased Volier Johnson) for 11 years, and Edwards had been with him for two. We look forward to seeing more of them, as the post-COVID reopening of theatres continues.