The image of a young boy wearing his mother’s red high heels, gazing into a mirror entered Tawiah M’carthy’s imagination in 2008 and stuck, so he wrote a poem about him.
“There were things about that boy that I found were similar to me growing up, so I wanted to investigate what that was about,” said the Ghana-born, Toronto-based actor.
“I was interested in finding how this young boy grew up, how he grew up to understand himself,” M’carthy continued. “In Ghana, being gay is not really part of the vocabulary that exists. The only name that exists… is a derogatory term ‘obaaberima,’ which means girl-boy.”
M’carthy transformed his poem into a one-man show called Obaaberima with the help of the young creators unit of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. The show collected rave reviews when it premiered in Toronto in 2012, and M’carthy brings Obaaberima to the Cultch, March 24 to April 4.
Obaaberima opens with a young Ghanaian man named Agyeman telling his cellmates, on the eve of his release from prison for committing a violent crime, how he came to be there. He needs to tell his truth to be free.
In Ghana, the young Agyeman lacked the language he needed to positively express who he was, so on the advice of an elderly friend he names his feminine side, dubbing her Sibongile. But to fit in in Ghana, he needed to reject Sibongile and his homosexuality.
Then when Agyeman comes to Canada, those he gets close to criticize him for not being himself and accepting his sexuality.
“So it becomes how am I able to be myself fully? How am I able to be Ghanaian and Canadian?” M’carthy said.
M’carthy drew inspiration from his own experience of trying to adapt to a new culture when he moved from Ghana to Merritt, B.C. at age 15.
“I didn’t sound like anyone else, I didn’t look like anyone else,” he said. “Especially when you’re young, too. When you’re young it’s all about trying to fit in so that you’re not a weird one.”
It wasn’t until M’carthy studied theatre at York University in Toronto that he truly came into himself.
“There’s no hiding when you’re becoming an artist because, as much as possible, you’re sharing parts of yourself with the world when you’re on stage, you share a part of yourself if you’re writing,” he said. “And if you’re not true to yourself, that connection that you create as an artist, you will not get from other people.”
M’carthy spent four years exploring the truths he wanted to tell and how he wanted to tell them with Buddies in Bad Times, the largest and longest-running queer theatre in the world.
The result is a North American piece of theatre told through a traditional West African style of storytelling, incorporating spoken word, dance and live music performed by Ghanaian-Canadian Kobena Aquaa-Harrison.
Evalyn Parry, who performed Spin at the Cultch in 2013, helped M’carthy develop Obaaberima and directs the performance.
M’carthy believes Obaaberima speaks a universal language.
“It just happens that the character is from Ghana... It just happens that the character is queer,” M’carthy said. “But the message within the play is something that I believe is universal. We are all, no matter where you’re from, even if you were born and raised here in Canada, we all go through that personal journey of being able to accept ourselves for who we are, or we struggle with trying to please others or fit in with whatever community that we grow into.”
Audience members can participate in post-show Q&A sessions March 25, 29 and 31.
For more information, see thecultch.com.
