25918: Hermantin(News)Taboo subjects explored in Haitian 'Monologues' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Fri, Aug. 05, 2005

Miami Herald

THEATER
Taboo subjects explored in Haitian 'Monologues'
With a Creole-French production of Eve Ensler's sexually bold play, Haitian 
women in South Florida take a risk and look to the future.
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@herald.com

The subject, say the play's producer, director and one of its stars, isn't one 
commonly discussed in Haiti: women's sexuality.

As Elizabeth Guerin, who hosts the daily Creole radio talk show Allo Babeth 
from 1 to 2 p.m. on WRHB-AM (1020), puts it with a laugh, ``Haitians don't talk 
about sex. They do it, but they don't talk about it.''

On Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at Miami's James L. Knight Center, seven actresses 
will take on that taboo when they speak frankly of all things sexual in Pawol 
Chat, a Creole-French version of Eve Ensler's worldwide hit The Vagina 
Monologues.

What the women want is to bring edgy, adventurous contemporary theater in 
Creole to South Florida, then take it to other cities with large Haitian 
communities in both the United States and Canada.

Adapted and staged by Florence Jean Louis Dupuy, a Haitian playwright, teacher 
and director now living here, Pawol Chat marks the beginning of what all the 
women involved hope will be a richer, more daring and eventually more frequent 
theater component to the mix of Haitian music, art and dance in South Florida.

To date, producer-playwright Jan Mapou, owner of the Little Haiti bookstore 
Libreri Mapou, has been the major force behind serious Creole theater here. 
Through the Sosyete Koukouy, a group that champions Creole culture, arts and 
literacy, Mapou has seen Felix Morisseau-Leroy's Creole adaptation of Antigone 
done at Dade County Auditorium in 1998 and his own historical play-with-music, 
Libéte ou Lannmo (Liberty or Death), performed at the Gusman Center for the 
Performing Arts last year.

But with Pawol Chat, Guerin and her producing partner, Tamara Beliard, are 
extending the reach of their Art'Space Productions -- which produces content 
for the Haitian Television Network (carried on Comcast Cable Channel 689), for 
radio and for marketing campaigns -- into theater.

Partnering with director Dupuy, whose L'Atelier Theatre Eclosion successfully 
presented Pawol Chat in Haiti in 2003, Guerin and Beliard are passionate about 
bringing Ensler's 1996 play -- which discusses rape, incest, birth, women's 
anatomy and orgasms, among other things -- to South Florida's growing Haitian 
community.

''Haitians are very conservative, so this is a big risk,'' says the 26-year-old 
Beliard, who has seen productions of The Vagina Monologues at the University of 
Miami (she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in accounting there) and in 
France. ``But for people of my generation, this is a huge thing.''

Guerin loves such risk-taking, though, and does it daily on Allo Babeth.

''I talk very frankly on subjects -- on color problems in the Haitian 
community, on Vodou, on everything including sex,'' she says. ``I had three 
girls [from the cast] on, talking about sex. The listeners would never talk 
like this if they weren't on the phone [and therefore anonymous]. People aren't 
used to this kind of play here.''

In the cast are Cynthia Jean Louis, Audrey Guerrier, Fabienne Colimon, Nicole 
Zamar, Daniele Jean Robert, Huguette Saint Fleur and Sabrina Monsanto, the only 
South Florida-based actor in the production. In the play, Monsanto plays a 
stressed intellectual who goes to a workshop in order to get in touch with her 
sexuality.

''This play has blown me away completely,'' Monsanto says. 'It was 
revolutionary when it was done in Haiti. Women would come up to us and say, `I 
can relate!' It was so welcomed and acclaimed.''

Director Dupuy, who now teaches at Broward Community College, began working 
with the actresses when they were little girls in Haiti. With this production, 
she says, the company is finally ``. . . blooming in my hands . . . In Haiti, 
people like popular theater, not this kind of theater. It took 10 years to 
catch the audience, 14 to train the actresses, but I hope this is the beginning 
of more [Haitian] theater here.''

Whatever the audience reaction is -- if Pawol Chat were a sellout Sunday, then 
900 people would see it -- Guerin believes Dupuy has achieved something 
distinctive with her interpretation of The Vagina Monologues.

''Eve Ensler's play is great -- it's intellectual, but it's also colder,'' she 
says. ``Florence's production is very hot. She adds some Caribbean black spice 
to it.''

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.