Saving Grace

BARRACKS, 28, who was born about the time that Dawkins’ first play was staged, told me that after producing plays primarily for high school students for the past seven years or so, he is now trying, with Saving

Grace, to market his shows to adults too. Audiences the first two nights were good, he continued, and on Sunday night I saw for myself a 300-seat theatre nearly full of enthusiastic people.

Whereas Pressure Drop’s playing style is realistic, that of Saving Grace is melodramatic. It’s a larger-than-life, over-the- top style bordering on farce or ‘Roots’ that Barracks, who is both writer and director, has deliberately chosen to work in with all his productions. It works with Saving Grace, which is about the consequences of a married man keeping a girlfriend.

Barracks makes his characters, and pre-scene announcers, speak directly to the audience – ‘breaking the fourth wall’,“in theatre parlance. The characters also consciously perform for the audience, so the helper, Miss G (Dawnette Hinds-Furzer), is introduced “bubbling” – that is, gyrating her ample behind – to a dancehall song for the audience’s entertainment.

The three actresses, Hinds-Furzer, Renae Williams (Grace) and Gracia Thompson (Vivian Johnson), adopt deliberately artificial accents; HindsFurzer and Williams speak an extra-broad patois, while Thompson is exaggeratedly ‘upper St Andrew’. The actor, John Chambers, though, acts realistically, providing a welcome foil to the others.