In The Red and Brown Water

1.)  The main character was Oya. She was a teenager who loved running and was considering doing it for a career. However, her mother, Mama Moja, was very sick and she had to turn down an offer to go to school and run there in order to take care of her mother. Soon after that, her mother passed away and Oya was left on her own. She tried to take the man from state up on his offer, but they had found a new girl who worked extra hard to run for them and she was now better than Oya was. Oya was now lonely with no place to go in her life since her running didn’t work out for her. She felt that she would be stuck in the same town doing the same thing for the rest of her life. Shango was her first love interest. When her mother died, he consoled her and they started a relationship soon after that. However, he was very unreliable and not accepting of her love for him. They argued all the time but Oya could never seem to break away from him. Shango showed up one day in his army uniform telling Oya that he was going to boot camp. She was heart broken but soon turned her attention to a new man in her life: Ogun. He had been madly in live with Oya throughout the whole show and it seemed that for as long as he had known her he loved her. Oya settled down with him in her house, but it was obvious that she was not truly in love with him like she was with Shango. When Shango came home from the army, he visited Oya and her love for him immediately came back. He was very distant like he always was with her, and it made her very upset. Ogun found out that they were seeing each other again and Oya and Ogun grew apart, barely able to be around each other anymore. Throughout all of this, Oya’s main concern is getting pregnant. While everyone around her was getting pregnant and having children, she was unable to as much as she tried. When she found out that Shango impregnated another girl in their town, that was the last straw for her. It drove her to insanity and the play ended with her tragic, disturbing death.

2.)  The most important thing for Oya was making a life for herself. She didn’t want to be stuck in that small town doing the same thing day after day for the rest of her life. Her first opportunity for a life change came when the man from state offered for her to come run at their school. She would have had schooling paid for and been able to create a successful life for herself. However, her mother was sick and she had to turn down the opportunity. When she contacted him a year later, they had already found someone else for the position. Next, she wanted to start a life for herself by getting pregnant and starting a family. She felt like it would give her life meaning if she brought a child into the world and was able to raise it.  Unfortunately, Oya never made a life for herself. She spent everyday sitting on the porch outside of her house, watching everyone else’s lives go by.

3.)  The most compelling part of the story was the dancing. It was not like any other musical with singing and dancing, this was different. The interpretive dancing and odd-sounding music brought an African feel to the play and caught my attention instead of just having constant dialogue to tell the story.

4.)  It was a little difficult to follow the story line of the performance. They didn’t do a very good job explaining everything that was going on and I felt as though you had to fill in information on your own to be able to understand what was happening.

5.)  This was not my first time seeing a live performance. I have seen a few on Broadway but this was very different. The music and dancing was very unconventional which caught my attention. The other performances I have seen were more interesting to me and had a better story line, however this was not bad by any means.