Shakespeare in Paradise, or Trying to Change the World

Full disclosure. I don’t like the world we live in much. I’ve written a lot about different bits and pieces of it and why I don’t like it, so don’t look for details right here. But there’s too little about the world that satisfies me. This is the truth.

The thing is, I grew up with a brother who has always put, and kept, me in my place. (In using those words I’m not using them they way that they were used for centuries, to remind people other people had coerced, oppressed, and subjugated that they deserved the coercion/oppression/subjugation and were not worthy of being in any other place. I’m using them as a way to say my brother kept and keeps me humble. Or at any rate, tries to.) One of the things that he said to me once upon a time long ago was: Don’t complain. If you can do something about it, change it. If you can’t, shut up. There’s no point in complaining.

So. Ever since then, I’ve tried to figure out whether I could in fact change the world, or change something about the world, so that I wouldn’t have time to complain about things I don’t like. That’s kept me pretty busy for some time. And now I want to write a little about it, because nobody’s getting any younger and sometimes people don’t finish their projects before they are called to move on.

In 2003, I accepted a position in government, the only one I would have wanted or accepted after my first short stint in government back in the 1980s. The position was called Director of Culture. The person who had held that position for the past ten years or so was moving on, being kicked upstairs so to speak, and the position was coming vacant. I’d just returned to Nassau from eight years’ living abroad, getting higher degrees and teaching, flying back and forth from one side of the globe to the other. It was a hopeful time. We were in a new century, we had a new generation of leaders, and we had a new set of ideas and promises about this nation that was looking like it would be a second wave of nation-building, a new phase of independence, a moment when we would go beyond the building of roads and power stations and docks and airports to building the Bahamian people.

But it should’ve told me something when it took me sixteen months to be confirmed in that position. Between the time I said I’d be interested in the position and went for my initial interview with the Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture and Permanent Secretary, when they told me basic things like what the salary would be and what I might be expected to do, and the time I was told to report to Thompson Boulevard and move into my almost-new office, sixteen months had passed. Almost enough time to have two full-term children. And in that time I had been asked whether I wouldn’t want to be Director of Youth, or whether I might want to stay on at the College of The Bahamas, or …

I took up the position of Director of Culture for the Bahamas government on October 20, 2003, and I remained in that position for five years. Five years and two months and one week to be exact; my last day in it was December 31, 2008. And in that time I learned, pretty effectively, that you can’t change the world when the structures you are working in and with and for are the same structures that built the not-great world to begin with. All the ideas and documents and effort and prayer and tears and anger cannot move a needle that is sewing the same old thread on the same old cloth (Yes, mixed metaphor; I am aware). And worse, when that thread and cloth are invisible and are being used to clothe emperors who have no clothes at all …

So when I left, I vowed to put my efforts from there on into something that would make a difference, something that would change the world.

And so:

Shakespeare in Paradise.

An international theatre festival to be held in Nassau.

An audacious idea at the time, given that the Prime Minister and his government had just recently pretty clearly indicated that The Bahamas was not capable of hosting any festival at all.

An even more audacious idea, given that we had no permanent place to perform theatre, nowhere to rehearse it, no money, no extensive stable of actors, no sponsors, no … well, nothing.

We had an idea; we had a team of theatre veterans; and we had connections. And we had a passion and a belief that this could be done, that this could succeed. We put out a call, we announced the idea, we partnered with people who knew how to fundraise and organize, we called on people’s good will. We set up a company, we set a date, we squabbled, we dreamed, we set up launch parties, we pulled people on board who came and gave us their time, their talents, their visions.

People like Tanya Hanna. David Burrows. Delores Adderley. Julia Ames. Craig Pinder. Patti-Anne Ali. Kim Brockington. Adrian Archer. Ken Corsbie. Margot Bethel. Matthew Kelly. Deon Simms. Like Theresa Moxey Ingraham and Betty Knowles at the Dundas; Erica James at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas; Enrico Gazzaroli of Greycliff; Rita Marley of the Marley Resort. (These last two were Tanya’s connections she leveraged for us!) We fundraised, we promoted, we begged, we borrowed, we rehearsed, we envisioned, and we pulled off our first international festival in October 2009: October 5-12 to be exact. One long weekend of public shows, and a week of matinees for schoolchildren who had had their and their administrators’ arms twisted to get them to come out for a couple of hours on a school day to see Shakespeare performed for them.

We begged for grants and partnerships, and, in those early days, we got them. The Ministries of Youth, of Education, and of Tourism gave grants to help us mount the festival. Cable Bahamas Cares Foundation, the Charitable Arts Foundation, the Lyford Cay Foundation—these all contributed, if not in the first festival, in the early days. We sold ads in our programme—nowhere enough to cover the cost of producing the programmes but ads nonetheless. We went out on a limb, and we dived into the deep deep end.

And here we are, over fifteen years later, and our festival is now three weeks long and growing. We have presented 90 separate shows, fifteen of them works of Shakespeare (14 plays, one collection of sonnets). We’ve brought in 24 international works. And we’ve mounted 48 Bahamian productions, give or take. We’ve welcomed over 50,000 audience members (it would be more if we had our big theatre operational). And we have involved over 1,000 people in our shows.

Yes, Virginia. We’ve done a thing.