Miss Miles: refocused

I once took one of Tony Hall's short drama courses on the Jouvay Popular Theatre Process. I never finished writing my own play, didn't even go to the final classes. But I was and still am fascinated and inspired by his assertion that we artists all are connected to Carnival archetypal figures and must learn to find, embrace and embody them to find our true creative power.

In his new play Miss Miles: Woman of the World, Gene Miles (Cecilia Salazar) is resurrected onstage to tell her story, taking charge of her own legend. The angle is just like what Hall has done with other disenfranchised women we've seen only through the eyes of a patriarchal lens; for example, his Jean and Dinah play. Miles outgrows her strict Roman Catholic upbringing to embody shades of several Carnival 'characters': the chantuelle, the bad behaviour sailor and something of the fancy sailor in her ever-stylish dresses, killer heels and beehive hairdos.

"Cecilia Salazar was magnificent," a client told me while we discussed the play. It took me another month to go see the play myself, but I must say that I disagree. Woman of the world Gene Miles was the magnificent one; Salazar was just her vessel. Of course I'm just being dramatic: Salazar WAS magnificent as Miles. It is a rare actress/actor who can make you forget that this is a play and they are acting. But Salazar wore Mile's skin like her own, from precocious ingenue to vivacious socialite to broken woman. It's a one-woman play, which is an exhausting task I'd never want to take on, but Salazar made it look easy, switching between Miles and impersonating other 'characters' like Justice Keith Lecock: "Let justice be done, whatever the cost."

As a playwright, I think Hall's use of music is rib-ticklingly spot on (I know that's not a word); there are Gregorian chants for Miles' early religious seriousness, Nina Simone's haunting, cracked vocals for the awkwardness of youth and frustrated suffering of her later life. Miles keeps interspersing her soliloquies with snippets of 40s, 50 and 60s calypso and begins the play in a sparkling red dress, belting out Calypso Rose's Fire In Me Wire. This musical thread snakes its way throughout the play, a foreshadowing of Mile's tragic life:

"It always struck me that that song is a kind of a warning ... to help your neighbour out the fire," she mused thoughtfully. "But sometimes it might be best to let the fire burn."

In an odd twist of fate, Miles happens upon documents that indicate a deliberate squeezing out of small gas dealers to create a monopoly on gas by a powerful syndicate, just like her accountant father exposed misappropriation of funds in the 'Caura Dam Racket' in the 1940s. She becomes critical of the very political party that she campaigned for and was so proud of when it ushered in an independent T&T in 1962. By that time Miles was a woman grown, but perhaps still possessing some of the naivete of her youth when she decided to testify about what she knows. But her honesty and her gender are used to destroy her.

She was victimised, pushed out of her job in the public service, dismissed as a crazy woman of loose morals (due to her former relationship with one of the kingpins of the syndicate, called 'O'Honey' in the play) and became socially untouchable. In helping to 'out' the fire, Miles was the one who is torched. Her descent into anger and frustration is palpable in Hall's imagery of crucifixion and references to Joan of Arc, another brave, strongly moral and naive woman caught in the intrigues of a vicious old boys club and burnt at the stake. "It's a jumbie jamboree," Miles sings at the start of the second half; an amusing tweak of Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree and chilling comment on the moral 'death' of the government that protects corrupt men and let Miles be crushed out of existence.

I'd just begun reflecting on how similar Miles' T&T looks to our country today when Salazar began dropping sharp little references to more recent political bohbohl: who could miss 'hot spots'? Or the 'Hart' of the matter? States of emergency and Advantage left us snickering, but also a bit chilled by the fact that what happened to Gene Miles could happen again today, woman PM or no. Life imitating art? I'd like to think so.


Photo taken from Miss Miles: Woman of the World Facebook page. Not used with permission but hopefully I will not get sued since I credited them and I gave them a good review :D.

P.S. How could I forget the stage? Stark, mostly black, with white and red higlights. Purity and tragedy on corruption, perhaps? Definitely makes me think that morality, no matter how pure, can be more black than white.