'Pantomime' offers plenty to talk about

By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll

Don’t envision Marcel Marceau pretending to be trapped in a box when you hear “Pantomime” is the August play at Payomet Center for the Performing Arts in Truro.

Director Vernice Miller has heard that assumption before and reassures potential patrons that the nonverbal Mummenschantz is nowhere nearby.

If You Go

“Pantomime,” written by Derek Walcott, presented by Payomet Performing Arts Center; 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through Sept. 2; the tent at the Highlands Center, Old Dewline Road, Truro; $5 and $20; 508-487-5400

In the Caribbean, the term “pantomime” has a very different meaning. Miller says it’s an improvisational, joyful, funny, effusive holiday entertainment that – like commedia dell’arte – uses familiar stock characters to tell funny stories with a moral. And the Caribbean is where the playwright, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, is from, as is Miller.

“For me, this goes back to my childhood,” she says. “We didn’t have Santa Claus, we had panto.”

Walcott’s story, in its Cape premiere at Payomet, focuses on emancipation – within a person’s culture and his soul. Set at a time after colonial rule is abolished, the plot focuses on a British expatriate and hotelier in Tobago, haunted by a personal tragedy, trying to convince his black employee to help stage a version of “Robinson Crusoe” to entertain the guests.

While discussing various versions, including having the white man play servant Friday, the two men – played by Gustave Johnson and Tom Wolfson – explore social ills and their own struggles.

“It’s a very multilayered piece, as anything Derek does is, but there is joy in the piece,” Williams says, adding simply: “It’s a pantomime.”

A true pantomime involves audience responses learned from childhood, and Miller had to reconcile herself to not being that true to the panto spirit. “I guess it’s a hybrid panto,” she says of this play. “When all is said and done, the style is less important and story is more important. There is an improvisational feeling, they are taking pointed thematic moments to the spectator, they are incorporating music and listening to the rhythms of the language.”

And they’re talking. A lot. No nonverbal skits allowed.