'Jaguar' fails to get message across

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

"Jaguar Priests: Our Culture is Myth" is written and directed by University of Hawai'i M.F.A. directing candidate Cristian (Cee) Ellauri. It draws on characters from the biblical Book of Genesis and suggests a recurring cyclical struggle between opposing forces that ultimately determines the fate of the earth and all human kind.

It also struggles to say something about artistry, brute force, environmentalism and exploitation — but the message is obscured among the visual images and aural patterns. There's also a concurrent internal character struggle when real humanity creeps into roles that seem written only to serve didactic purposes.

All this struggling tends to wear out an audience. And worn out audiences tend to stop paying attention.

Ellauri's plot makes great leaps in time and forces characters into situations like square pegs into round holes.

The first scene takes place in 3000 B.C. as young Adam (Jonathan Clark Sypert) and Eve (Darnna Banks) try to convince their stubborn hunter/gatherer elders to adopt new ways. They are almost sacrificed for their ideas, but are rescued and absorbed into an opposing tribe of killer warriors.

Fifteen hundred years later, they have spawned Cain (Savada Gilmore) and Abel (Jazumin Davis), opposing princes in the famed city of Babylon. Cain, a rabid civilizer, slays his brother Abel, an artistic humanitarian, while at the same time battling the savage hordes.

Act 2 leaps to Massachusetts in the 1800s, where Adam and Eve try to generate the industrial revolution by introducing machines and assembly lines to elders that hold tightly to craftsman ways. A group of thugs with clubs institute the new age by force.

The next jump is a mere 200 years to modern Boston, where Cain and Abel inherit a global monopoly and again battle each other to restore or exploit their Mother Earth.

Throughout the time warps, a trio of rapping fools dressed in circus costumes narrate and try to connect us to the action.

The politics of the production fall flat. The "Jaguar Priests" are never explained and the "sacred myth of our culture" is not much exposed — unless most of us continue to be believe that progress is our most important product.

But the production reveals dramatic flair and theatrical vision, and some of the character moments — although fleeting — are charming and forceful. Body language between Sypert and Banks as the young Adam and Eve suggests that they are clearly infatuated with each other. And when Gilmore and Davis aren't beating on each other with sticks and fists as Cain and Abel, they deliver a tense and palpable brotherly bond.

Still, if this is a message play, its meaning is muffled by the drumbeats and rap.