It’s not every day that you would walk into the Kenya National Theatre auditorium to enjoy a play by yourself, or with a loved one and find a purely Christian or Religious production as the item of the evening. That’s not to say it’s impossible to have such content. I recently watched a faith-based play, Now Let Us Make Man. If you’ve ever had a chance to read the Bible, you would be familiar with these words, from the book of Genesis where the Creation Story is narrated by an omnipresent God who starts by creating all things, creatures of the earth and extraterrestrial beings and after that, they unanimously say, “Now let us make man...”, and that’s how the first man is made, according to the Biblical creation narrative.
What would you do, if you were a Christian aiming to use theatre as an evangelism tool with the intention or hope of converting more people into the faith? These might have been the questions that Joel Muriithi and his crew and cast of Now Let Us Make Man grappled with before deciding to set everything in motion.
Now Let’ Us Make Man is a stage play or an action-based musical that tells the story of God’s plan to rescue man from evil so that man can spend his afterlife with God in heaven. However, God’s archangel and arch-rival, the devil, is always on the prowl and is constantly tempting this same man to distract him from God’s plan and invite him to spend his afterlife in the devil’s paradise.
The striking spectacle when I walked into the auditorium was the set design. The production’s set designer went over and beyond to transform the minimal stage area of Ukumbi into three separate entities:
The Earth in the lower part and two upper champers constituted Heaven and Hell. The use of white fiber to represent the purity of the heavenly environment and also to match the white costumes of God and his angels was a great effort. The idea of using fiber to create clouds is however, not new as a few other productions have done this before, and I felt that this designer could have stretched their imagination even further to give us the idea that heaven is a glorious and dazzling metropolis that everyone should aspire to inherit.
I actually found hell to be more attractive than heaven from this set design, what the hell? The use of recycled materials to make hellish plants and the red lighting that illuminated the Hell-King actually worked better. However, the lighting design had some limitations because the earthly section of the stage was always barely lit. Maybe this was intentional, only that there is no clarity as to why.
I was still unsure whether to categorize this production as a musical theatre or just a play with singing. I think the latter describes it more because several musical theatre elements were not included in Now Let Us Make Man. It’s okay to break away from these conventions, however, make your deliberate choices work for the good of the production, otherwise, it would look like they were just comfortable choices made for the sake of just producing a work of art. I would advise workshopping the story to make it clearer regarding its plot and the character’s choices and intentions.
The song selection could be better to complement the story more and not just as a “plug and play” effect. I laud a number of actors who put more effort into breathing life into their characters. The guy playing the devil, as well as the doctor and Jill, the jilted, 17-year-old girl who gets pregnant and is stranded on how to move on with life after the pregnancy. I loved Angel Michael’s rap and would have loved for it to be his sort of identity whenever he appears/speaks.
Since we were told to expect a sequel of Now Let Us Make Man, I hope the continuing story is coming back more refined and engaging. Let’s see how the man spends his life on Earth after they made him in the first part.