Romeo & Juliet

Matt arrived in Mauritania in June of 2001. For three months, he studied the Pulaar language and trained to be a TEFL instructor in a Mauritanian secondary school. In August he was sworn in as a volunteer and began his Peace Corps service in the village of Bababe. Aligned with the school, the mayor’s office, and several women’s cooperatives, he has collaborated on a number of projects outside of his teaching responsibilities. In March, he organized a Women’s Opportunities Conference in which several workingwomen in the village spoke formally to the entire community about their occupations, education, and knowledge about opportunities for young girls. In addition, he oversaw the training of female trainers who presented an AIDS prevention sensibilisation as seen from the female perspective. To compliment the conference, he gathered a small group of girls to write a play about some salient Mauritanian gender issue. He asked the girls what they wanted to address. One girl was brought to tears as she talked about how her father had arranged a marriage for her with a man she didn’t know or like. She told him that it wasn’t fair that girls couldn’t choose whom they would marry. The others joined in her protest and forced marriage became their theme of choice. As that was early in Matt's service, he didn’t feel comfortable enough with the language to write a play from scratch, so he recommended using the story of Romeo and Juliet, where they could highlight Juliet’s plight as a girl being forced into marriage with a man she doesn’t love (she loves Romeo.) It was something the girls could relate to and be passionate about, and so could he!

Rehearsals started with Matt explaining the play scene by scene in Pulaar. Whatever he wasn’t able to say, he’d act out as clearly as possible until they could make up their own clear translation. For two weeks, the girls wrote out synopses for every scene making changes in name and place and occupation where they could better relate the story to Mauritania. Friar Laurence became the village imam. Mercutio became Djibbi Kangado (the town crazy person.) The city of Verona became our very own Bababe. After the initial drafting, they invited in a few more girls. It was the responsibility of the first batch to make sure that the second batch could clearly understand the story as they had transcribed it. The girls began their process of story telling—the backbone of their play.

Next, the girls began improvising the play scene by scene based on their synopsis. Employing certain acting exercises and story telling techniques, Matt began to sculpt a piece that he hoped a Pulaar crowd would identify with, but that a non-Pulaar speaker could also relate to. This involved eliciting the girls to choose clear objectives as their characters, and to pursue those objectives physically and vocally with boldness that Mauritanian girls are not accustomed to having. As their confidence grew, they began to see a story that was vivid, funny, sometimes sad, and authentically Mauritanian. Rehearsing in a classroom after school, they couldn’t keep the boys away from the windows. They would forego their usual afternoon soccer match to gawk at the girls’ process and to chuckle at the crazy white guy bouncing and sweating frantically around the room placing actors and pushing them further into the biggest, boldest form of themselves. They were also enamored with the play that was taking place. It was alive.

The first performance was scheduled for March third, but the police chased them off the school property on the grounds that Matt had not “properly” informed them where they’d be performing (he hadn’t paid them off.) They straightened out the situation the next morning without any financial transaction, and they agreed the play could be performed that night. March fourth, at the West-end goal post of Bababe's football field, under a single light bulb run off a generator that echoed under the endless sky, a crowd of 500 kids stood, sat and crammed into a circle and the girls performed Romeo and Juliet for what may have been the first time ever in Mauritania. At times, the crowd was silent. Other times they couldn’t help yelling out to the actors what they should do. Still other times, they would repeat and discuss a funny line amongst themselves. This must have been what Romeo and Juliet had been like at the Globe in the 1400’s. The girls were victorious and the crowd cheered them as the play ended. Most had never seen a play so well rehearsed or actors so boldly dedicated.

News travels fast in a country with little formal technological communication and a month later they were invited to perform in a nearby district capital, Boghe. They were in the midst of producing a Girls conference and felt that our play would compliment their conference well. There, they performed for over 2000 people in an outdoor theatre whose walls were made of old rice sacks stretched together between broken tree trunks. The girls had been afraid that a ‘foreign’ crowd would be unreceptive to their play, but they were proven wrong as the audience was immediately sucked in by the plays non-traditional opening scene. The girls enter one at a time singing and dancing, eventually merging into the opening scene of Shakespeare’s play where the servants of the two opposing houses meet in the market and have a brawl. The fight scenes always excite the crowd.

Boghe turned out to be the start of a nation wide tournee that took the acting troupe to four other cities in Mauritania by car and by plane. Matt arranged for volunteers in each of the host cities to set up a performance place with sound and lighting equipment, and to arrange for host families for each of the girls. In each town, they were greeted warmly, and the girls met with other Mauritanian girls and long unseen family members from around the country. There were reunions and new friendships forged everywhere they went and the girls were treated with deference and respect. On top of an already lengthy rehearsal process, Matt held pick-up rehearsals in each new space to acquaint the girls with their new conditions and allow them to feel comfortable in them. Each night, they were presented with new spatial formations that they were able to adapt to use to their advantage. They began to understand the flexibility involved in being an actor and the endurance needed to complete a large project. They left Bababe as girls who had rarely left their own village. They returned after two weeks as women who had seen and flown over vast stretches of their homeland.

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