Writer: Mojisola Adebayo
Directors: Gail Babb and S. Ama Wray
Newly widowed from a husband to whom she was devoted but did not love, Mrs is now looking for the one thing that has eluded her for her whole life: an orgasm.
Thus begins Mojisola Adebayo’s Stars, principally a solo piece for Debra Michaels as Mrs and all the characters she meets in a quest that turns to be less about orgasms in general, and more about finding satisfaction and fulfilment even when others decide that such things should be denied.
Designer Miriam Nabarro places Mrs on a disc with an extreme sideways rake, with a few kitchen props – a table, a stool, a fridge that is larger than it looks – to express Mrs’ whole world. If there is a hint of agoraphobia in Mrs, it is more emotional rather than merely physical; a woman tantalised by the thought of going into space, fuelled by a love of Star Trek and other science fiction shows, but who rarely leaves the house.
As the show’s storyteller, Michaels’ Mrs skips around her personal timeline, divulging her difficult relationship with the Church, both with her Catholic faith and an Evangelical sect she dabbled with at a dark period in her life. Stories of the latter group’s attempt to exorcise demons from her – the reason, they suggest, that her husband has taken up with another woman on the same estate – play into a recurring theme of people in authority intent on subjugating women.
Mrs’ relationship with Maryam, a young Muslim girl who pops by after school every day to work on her science project, plays into the same theme. The gradual reveal of why Maryam spends so long in the toilet – a byproduct of her FGM, a procedure done in the name of making women “clean” for their future husbands – allows for a line to be drawn between this, the church’s attempt to define women, and a later conversation with Mrs’ former work colleague, Maxi.
In character as Maxi, Michaels talks about how they were born with what a doctor describes as ‘ambiguous genitalia’, and how Maxi’s mother had to forcefully resist surgery that would make her baby’s private parts fit into a more rigidly defined idea of what they should look like.
It is this section of Adebayo’s piece which is the most striking, partly because intersex people and their bodies are so rarely even mentioned. That they are done so here with such an emphasis on joy and empowerment is doubly affecting.
Elsewhere, Mrs’ relationship with her estranged son – now a successful DJ – is all-pervasive, with Bradley Charles spinning decks from a booth at the side of the stage throughout. In truth, the omnipresent electronica gets in the way of Michaels’ delivery more often than it complements it.
Animated Afrofuturist backdrops, illustrated by Candice Purwin, use art inspired by the Dogon people of Mali to frame and advance the story. It ties in Mrs’ love of space with the Dogon mythology of the Nommo, androgynous, multi-gendered, part amphibians who came to Earth from the Sirius binary star system.
This framing device brings together all the strands of Adebayo’s expansive treatise. The Nommo did not have the rigid delineation of male and female that causes so much pain. By the time Mrs’ quest for an orgasm returns to the fore, we have almost forgotten that is how her story started; what happens in between is richer, stranger and more empowering.
Continues until 4 May 2023
