Trade & Generations

by debbie tucker green

In Trade, Debbie Tucker Green puts an intriguing spin on the unease we feel as tourists in a country poorer than our own. She focuses on three black women on a Caribbean a hip young Londoner with a loud mouth and plenty of attitude, an older professional seemingly sensitive to her surroundings, and a resident native.

Genres: Plays, Feminism, Theatre

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

These were the 3rd and 4th plays by tucker for me to read, and with each I am becoming less and less enchanted by her. These two early works both suffer from a very modest amount of material stretched far beyond reason in order to create something of produce-able length (as it is, both of these would take less than an hour to perform, and repetitiousness abounds).

trade is about three black women in some tropical resort town - the Novice and the Regular have both come there in order to indulge their desire for paid male sex workers, while the 3rd, the Local, is the partner of a man (if I’ve got this right - hard to tell) both of the other women have employed. The dialogue is not only repetitious and elliptical but is done in a patois that is hard to read on the page. And it takes about a third of the play before one can even decipher what it is the women are talking about.

generations is an even shorter work and presents the exact same dialogue concerning the culinary expertise in a South African family, with various characters disappearing at the end of each scene and their portion of the dialogue being omitted in the next - the younger generation first, then the parents of those characters, finally leaving just the grandparents. All this is bookended with a choir singing about the dearly departed and ending with the South African National anthem. Huh? I didn’t get it.

[Izzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

TRADE focuses on telling the story of three women (the local, the regular and the novice) whose names signify their relationship to the location they find themselves in. It's an interesting look at the idea of tourists and the freedom they can seek from "who they are back home (there) and who they want to be perceived as here."

Because of the casting choices of TRADE, there are only three characters taking up at least 2-3 verbal roles while never leaving the stage, I would love to see what this show looks like in action and how recognizing these roles is achieved.

GENERATIONS is fairly short and each scene composes of a mostly same script with the loss of one/two character(s) from the script, counting down the generations until only the eldest remain. A very blunt look at loss.

[Sepehr Asadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

فقط «نسل‌ها» رو خوندم فعلاً، وقت نکردم اون یکی رو کامل کنم. دوباره برمیگردم بهش. ولی اگر تاکر گرین نخوندید، یکی از مهم‌ترین نمایشنامه‌نویسان زنده رو دارید از دست می‌دید و عمرتون رو در ندانستن، هدر.