On February 28, at the Flea Theater, The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS), the LGBT theater company started in 1974 by late Leatherman and playwright Doric Wilson, presented a reading of a powerful, wrenching new play by Chris Weikel, “The Word from Kampala,” as part of the Chesley/Chambers Playwrights Project, named for late writers Robert Chesley and Jane Chambers. In ancient Greece, plays retold stories from mythology that were already familiar to the audience and the point was to see how knowingly and affectingly the particular playwrights presented them. At a time when the troubled world is still beset by the COVID pandemic and pouring out its hearts, money, and military aid to a Ukraine besieged by Russia, we still remember a recent time, on the 10th anniversary of Pride Uganda, when being gay and lesbian in that African nation was to incur the death penalty. It is important to be reminded of that shameful time, when people were outed in the newspapers and lost their families, jobs, and lives, at the hands of government, under the influence of American missionaries, and to see how playwright Weikel, director Douglas Dubois, and their cast, with Cat Gillespie managing the stage, movingly realized the history of this scourge.
The action moves fluidly from America to Uganda, sometimes seen simultaneously, and from past to present. American missionaries in Uganda, Jane (Sara Thigpen) and Jeremy (David Leepers), are convinced that they’re there doing the Good Work, but sure as Jane’s deviled eggs are naughtily nicknamed “Satanic eggs,” and Jeremy’s “sexual brokenness” isn’t as firmly in the past as he’d like to convey, they have succeeded, with inflammatory preaching against “abomination,” to be conquered by spiritual “awakening,” in sowing the seeds of a murderous campaign, their professed innocence notwithstanding. Their young son Paul (Christian Elán Ortiz), appalled by their work, as he sees his gay friend Munyiga (Louis DeVaughn Nelson) beaten to a pulp by police and then slain, tries to “fix things” and ally himself with Ugandan gays and lesbians, as Ugandan lesbian Ruthie (Achiro P. Olwoch) assists him in his well-meaning quest, even as she wryly declares, “I pray every day to be delivered from white people who want to help,” and informs him that gays in Uganda are referred to as fearsome “night dancers” or “zombies.” The missionary couple, having quit the church, are confronted for their hypocrisy by Seth (Jonathan Dewberry), Munyiga’s once less-than-understanding father, a spiritual leader now living in America, who connects the dots for them between their sermons and his son’s death at the hands of an oppressive government, and lets them know about Paul’s effort to combat the harm that his parents have wrought. If TOSOS ever treats “The Word from Kampala” to a full-fledged production, it behooves thinking, feeling theatergoers to see it.
We look forward to TOSOS’ April production, which, if I heard it right, is called “Love Is Maybe Probably Worth It.” Visit www.tososnyc.org for further information.