Sailors, hookers and drunks—a wartime romp! Or is it?
Dr Efebo Wilkinson’s award-winning play, “Same Khaki Pants,” will be produced by The UWI and opens on April 3 at the Learning Resource Centre at the St Augustine Campus, where it runs until April 6. It will then move to the Little Carib Theatre for the weekend of April 10-13.
Working the rehearsal process with the actors, Dr Wilkinson guides them into their roles.
“What do you think might have caused them to leave the Santi Doux [rumshop] and pick a fight?” he asks.
As playwright and director, he insists on focus, and as the fight and its trigger get physical, he charts the engagement, saying, “Yuh cyah go from so (limp, arms diffident) into a fight. You have to be prepared.”
It is Intro to Life Skills, where daily we find ourselves fighting up to get a little end somewhere. For us, preparedness could be mental toughness, or spirituality, or education. The situation wasn’t much different in 1945 wartime, the era in which the play is set.
“Same Khaki Pants is a story about what happened during the days when the Wallerfield base was in operation, and there were American army men on the base, and its negative impacts on Arima,” explains Dr Wilkinson. The story is seen through Squeezy’s eyes—the town drunk—and this is in a sense “symbolic of the rum and Coca-Cola lifestyle of the period.”
“When Same Khaki Pants was written in 1980 it was a pointed commentary on the Trinidad and Tobago lifestyle of the day,” he said. “Oil money was flowing like yankee dollars and liquor was flowing like yankee money. And significantly, today, now that it is being revived, it is once again a very pointed commentary on the Trinidad and Tobago of today.”
Dr Wilkinson hopes audiences will “connect the dots between what was happening then and what is happening now… to come away with the beauty of the story and the sense of how it unfolds.”
The play won the playwriting award (Best Village, 1980), the original play award (National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago, 1985), and the International Amateur Theatre Association production award, the Mundial, in Monaco in 1985.
Please note that showtimes are all at 8pm, except for Sundays when they are at 6pm.
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