MAS – more than mas

When Destra Garcia sang It’s Carnival on Tuesday night, the audience sat, hands raised and swaying, at the edge of their seats, belting out the lyrics with her.

It was the final scene of the Carnival-themed theatre-production MAS, and Garcia was the final soca star in a play that chiefly celebrated music.

The audience, a mixture of demographics, young and old, diverse gender identities, some in formal wear, at least one in what looked like the top of a Carnival costume, fully engaged with the show.

The play ran for two nights on Carnival Monday and Tuesday (February 15, 16) at the National Academy for the Performing Arts in Port of Spain. Written by poet-musician Muhammad Muwakil, directed by Tishanna Williams, and produced by Jayron Remy. Jules Sobion, CEO of Caesar’s Army Ltd, was the executive producer.

MAS is about a man imprisoned after losing a crucial part of himself, creating a paradox, as mas – the kind people in Trinidad play for two days almost every year – is a performance centred on freedom. It’s a play that delivers the zeitgeist of a covid19 Carnival in an unfamiliar new reality.

Muwakil (best known as a member of the band Freetown Collective) got the assignment to write the play two months ago and wrote it within a month.

While Carnival itself seems timeless, Muwakil told Sunday Newsday the play was written very much for this specific moment, when the world was trapped in a pandemic.

"The play is truly about finding ourselves. The artistes who played the characters really had to look inward and find the parts of themselves needed to play these characters."

Noting the National Carnival Commission's (NCC) stance that there would be no Carnival, Muwakil said it seemed even in terms of the country's leaders, there was also that feeling of being trapped.

He said he wrote the main characters to represent the four personality archetypes of the Trinidadian spirit, represented by Kaiso, Midnight Robber, Pierrot Grenade and Dame Lorraine.

The story follows a stick-fighter whose spirit has been split into four by a buss head in a gayelle, only to wake up in an unknown abyss and be forced on a journey where he must confront magical creatures at every turn.

The stick-fighter, Ratto, is skilfully played by Levee Rodriguez, a graduate of the University of Trinidad and Tobago’s fine arts programme.

Rodriguez portrayed the young stick-fighter as delightfully naïve, funny, carefree, and earnest, as he seeks to retrieve the bits of his spirit, lost to a competitor’s lash. To retrieve them, he must face a miscellany of characters, including the four larger-than-life elements of TT culture. In confronting these elements, Ratto, who views the audience as his cohorts, is reminded, sometimes with joyful coercion, other times with a rebuke, what makes a spirit thrive.

In MAS, the music provides the magic, arranged to tell an authentic Caribbean story. In the first act, a brilliant kaiso medley from David Bereaux
(known for his performances of ole-time calypso) and guitarist Marva Newton carries the story smoothly from dialogue to music and back again with Mistah Shak, Mical Teja, Jimmy October, Erphaan Alves, and Garcia joining the conversation with the audience.

The socially-distanced spectators, starved of live soca performances by pandemic restrictions, sang along to every song.

In a poignant moment at the end of his set, Bereaux performed Sparrow’s Memories, replacing George Bailey’s name with those of the more recently departed Sandra Des Vignes-Millington (Singing Sandra), Winston Bailey (Shadow) and Tony Hall and his brother Dennis Hall (Sprangalang).

There were a few moments where the musical score seemed to aggressively compete with the performers. One key moment was during Mistah Shak’s Rebel Music rendition.

The costuming, by Kimmy Stoute-Robinson, was inspired by traditional mas and lent to the mood of each act.

In many ways, MAS was a theatrical oasis in a so-far arid year, where culture has become a casualty. MAS and stories like it are necessary for the safeguarding of our cultural legacy.