stoning mary by Kwame Owusu

AUB Productions @ 2022

In the grip of civil war and inequality, people are forced to consider unimaginable choices. As the world grapples with seemingly impossible problems, this story of conflict forces us to consider a central question: How do we survive in a world at war?

Lyn Gardner (Guardian, 2005) describes Debbie Tucker Green’s plays as “urgent, angry accounts of the way we live now. There is something raw and direct in their fractured poetry and internal monologues that seems to lay bare the characters' emotional lives with the kind of psychological complexity that you expect of a novel but rarely find on the stage. Tucker Green, however, is having none of it.

“Stoning Mary has a teasing quality that makes the audience work hard to figure out exactly how the characters are connected as it pieces together three apparently disunited stories. In the first, a couple, both suffering from AIDS, can only afford one prescription for the drugs both need to stay alive; in the second, a child soldier returns to his parents. The final story concerns two sisters, the youngest of whom has been condemned to death by stoning.”

SceneOne+ 'This was a strong ensemble cast who worked very well together, but there were particularly good performances [...] and Gabriela Chanova as Older Sister. She skillfully managed to bring the difficult dialogue “off the page,” adding light and shade to the monologues with accomplished use of pauses.'