Broader Than Broadway: Jamaican Play ‘Not About Eve’ Comes To NYC

Words by Sherman Escoffery—

Some of you may remember Karl Williams as the guy who played the unnamed, right-wing, anti-communist politician in the highly-regarded Jamaican film Better Mus’ Come, which LargeUp sponsored when it premiered in New York earlier this year.

Well, Williams, a veteran actor whose theater acting credits in New York includes Pecong at The National Black Theater and Antony and Cleopatra at The Poets Den Theater, is about to impress New Yorkers again with his three-character drama, Not About Eve. It has already won the 2005 International Theater Institute Actor Boy Award for Best New Jamaican play, and the script was a 2011 A-List selection for the Readers’ Theater Series at the National Black Theater Festival in North Carolina. This play will be onstage in NYC for four days, premiering on November 29, at the Stage II Theatre in Times Square, just off Broadway.

Not About Eve is set in the middle-class home of the Shields family in Kingston, Jamaica. The household’s three women are at a crossroads in their lives, confronted by a changing society around them and the secrets in their own lives. The religious Mrs. Rochester clings to old-school values and is distressed when her fiercely independent granddaughter, Kimberley, a visual artist who represents a new generation seeking to define itself culturally and socially, begins to assert herself within the home. Meanwhile, the upwardly mobile Katherine, a sexually adventurous entrepreneur and widow, is literally caught in the middle, even as she herself struggles with the mistakes of her own past.

The cast of the New York production is comprised of Sharon Tsahai King as Mama Rochester, Ilana Warner as Katherine Shields, and Stacy Ann Brissett as Kimberly Shields, and is directed by Daphne Sicre.

Karl Williams as the politician in Better Mus’ Come