An urgent and troubling contemporary drama, The Rolling Stone unfolds in Uganda, where same-sex relationships have long been illegal and are punished harshly.
According to a program note by Chris Urch, the British author of this off-Broadway play that opened Monday in a Lincoln Center Theater production at its Mitzi E. Newhouse space, homophobia in that African nation has increased considerably over the last decades due to the influence of Christian missionaries.
In 2010, Rolling Stone, a tabloid in Uganda’s capitol city, splashed across its front page the photos, names, and addresses of people known or suspected to be homosexual. Violence and death resulted. Basing his fictional story upon this ugly occurrence, Urch’s play premiered in England in 2013.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
A clandestine romance that ignites between two nice young men, Sam (Robert Gilbert), a doctor who hails from Ireland, and Dembe (Ato Blankson-Wood), an 18 year-old native Ugandan, causes a crisis within the latter’s family. Dembe’s older brother Joe (James Udom) is the newly elected pastor of a struggling church. Their smart sister Wummie (Latoya Edwards) has grudgingly sacrificed her chance for a higher education so Dembe can get ahead in life.
Perhaps these siblings half-suspect that the deeply closeted Dembe may be gay, but they ignore this possibility until Rolling Stone starts naming names of supposedly gay people. The ensuing uproar and physical attacks upon individuals in the community threatens the lovers’ relationship and their lives. “Loving you has ruined me,” Dembe tells Sam.
Although Dembe repeatedly denies his sexuality, conflicts arise with Wummie, and especially Joe, who preaches homophobic hellfire to his parishioners. Because it is made evident that the siblings care deeply for each other, their confrontations register as all that more painful.
Others drawn into these family troubles are Mama (Myra Lucretia Taylor) a holy-rolling neighbor who later turns out to be not so holy, and her daughter Naome (Adenike Thomas), who recently lost her ability to speak. It is later revealed that Naome’s condition stems from a traumatic incident, but she might be considered symbolic of Ugandans who silently allow homophobia to spread.
Amid the paranoid fear and misinformed loathing that the two-act play dramatizes as citizens feel compelled to inform upon suspected others, a nasty sidelight exposes individuals who smear the reputations of people for personal reasons. These doings may incidentally remind viewers of the mood fostered by Arthur Miller in The Crucible.
A compactly written drama that utilizes only six characters, The Rolling Stone pointedly depicts a modern-day society blighted by ignorance and hate. Neatly deploying several adjoining plots and terse dialogue, Urch ratchets up the tension gradually as the play proceeds towards an open-ended finish.
Directed at a deliberate pace by Saheem Ali, who has staged striking productions such as Passage at Soho Rep and Kill Move Paradise at the National Black Theatre, the play benefits from an abstract setting by Arnulfo Maldonado that permits the action to flow freely between locations. While Ali’s blocking of the actors at times appears a tad obvious, as in a confrontation when Dembe is literally encircled by the others who question his sexuality, the director obtains solid performances from the ensemble.
If The Rolling Stone does not cover any fresh ground regarding extreme LGBTQ bias, it nonetheless is a worthy reminder, especially amid the recent local celebrations of Pride month, that there remain terrible places on this earth where such wholesale hate and injustice fester.
The Rolling Stone opened July 15, 2019, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and runs through August 25. Tickets and information: lct.org
