Jamaica, Farewell: She Got a Serious Plan

There's really only so much one can do with a one-person show.The standard formula is to recount a story from one's life, while sporadically acting out all the other characters.  Extra points if it's couched in a flashback to show how one has grown from the experience.

Debra Ehrhardt's one-woman show Jamaica, Farewell, does nothing particularly exciting with the genre, but her true story of her attempts to flee revolution-torn Jamaica for America in the 1970s is at least very interesting.  Ehrhardt has won NAACP awards for her previous works, and Jamaica, Farewell garnered an award in last year's NYC Fringe*, as well as a Proclamation from the City of New York for her "Outstanding Contribution to the Jamaican Community".

The goal is simple- little Debra is a yankee-phile from a young age, thanks to a best friend's inflated tales of Disney World and the stay ing-up-late candy-eating privileges afforded to minors in the USA.  She longs to escape her life with her drunken gambling father and patiently religious mother, and flee to America.  But her family is poor, and she can't get a visa, even when she has an acceptance letter to an American college.  Even when she brazenly impersonates a nun.
And then comes revolution.  Michael Manley becomes Prime Minister in 1972, ushering in a significant escalation of violence in Jamaica, with politically-armed gangs roving the streets.  Debra longs more to get to America, but of course visas are even harder to obtain, and no one unauthorized is allowed to leave Jamaica with more than $50, on pain of death.
Then she meets a handsome CIA agent, who she hopes will marry her and take her to America (Debra's maid got out that way); he routinely flies between Jamaica and Miami.  She overhears her boss on the phone saying he needs to get some money to Miami, and, knowing that her CIA man can just walk through customs, she hatches a plan.  She gets her boss to get her a visa as well as $10,000 for her time and effort delivering one million dollars to a guy in Miami named Bullet, then uses her sexual wiles to get the CIA man to unwittingly accompany her on the trip to Miami.  Despite lots of guilt and truly insane complications on the way to the airport, Debra makes it.

Ehrhardt is an engaging performer with lots of energy, making the story come to life as she tells it.  The criminal elements don't seem as shocking as, say, Tarantino's Jackie Brown, and the audience was firmly on her side through her international crime.  The play itself seemed over-long in parts, like an hour show padded out to an hour and a half. Most of the (mostly Caribbean, mostly female) audience seemed to enjoy it very much, even sometimes anticipating Erhardt's punchlines and calling them out in unison.

I enjoyed the piece, though the seating at the newly-renovated SoHo Playhouse was clearly not intended for someone with legs as long as mine, and I was uncomfortably squished through the running time.

Jamaica, Farewell
SoHo Playhouse

Photo Credit: Aaron Epstein
Debra Ehrhardt in Jamaica, Farewell