Manchineel + Seagrape: Archiving Caribbean Drama for Future Generations

by Michael R. Soriano

Manchineel + Seagrape, an open-access journal dedicated to publishing edited scripts of Caribbean plays, launched in October 2024, with the goal of preserving the rich tradition of Caribbean drama for scholars, educators, and students. Alongside making a growing catalogue of plays accessible to new audiences through digital publication, Manchineel + Seagrape provides updated contextual material—including new introductions by leading academics and scholars in Caribbean literature and dramaturgy—to further broaden the work’s pedagogical utility. The project received support from the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), LibraryPress@UF, and the University of Miami.

The project’s name, Manchineel + Seagrape, gestures towards the journal’s philosophy and ethos. As Kelly Baker Josephs, creator and editor of the project, notes, “Just as the manchineel and seagrape trees help to protect the coasts of the Caribbean and Florida, this project aims to safeguard Caribbean dramatic texts and make them available for scholars and students of the region.” Beginning in the fall of 2023, I worked alongside Dr. Josephs to make Manchineel + Seagrape a reality. Below, I offer a sketch of the current archive.

At the time of this writing, Manchineel + Seagrape has published three plays: The Rope and the Cross by Easton Lee, El Numero Uno by Pamela Mordecai, and Champagne and Sky Juice by Basil Dawkins. While distinct in their content and approaches, these plays collectively showcase the multifaceted nature of Caribbean—and, more precisely, Jamaican—theatrical expression through their engagement with broad themes, from spirituality and dance to history and class dynamics. We hope that Manchineel + Seagrape will be a vital archival and pedagogical resource that unsettles established dramatic canons and provides a necessary window into the varied tapestry of Caribbean art, history, and politics.

Vol. 1: The Rope and The Cross by Easton Lee

Easton Lee’s most popular play, The Rope and the Cross, is a reimagining of the Passion, the final events of the life of Jesus as recounted by the canonical Christian Gospels. It centres on figures such as Judas, Judas’s mother, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. As Tzarina T. Prater notes in her introduction, Lee engages in a deliberate “Caribbeanization” of the traditional Passion play by decoupling the genre’s pedagogical links to cultural literacy and citizen building, and directing it towards a radical critique of gender, power, and class. Lee situates The Rope and the Cross in Siloah—where he was raised—to emphasize the connections between the Passion narrative and the local socio-political, economic, and gendered realities in Jamaica. In so doing, Lee—an Anglican minister and religious dramatist—frames the figure of Jesus Christ as “a revolutionary who worked toward the liberation of economically and politically disenfranchised peoples and [whose] revolutionary face has been obscured and co-opted by colonialism, imperialism, and their agents” (Prater iii). As well as being a colourful and politically provocative imagining of the Passion, The Rope and the Cross offers scholars and educators an insightful instance of “Caribbeanization” as a potent reclamation strategy to “infuse the text with the quotidian concerns of Caribbean people and life, and represent distinctly Caribbean philosophical, spiritual and religious systems alongside tropes, symbols, and folk figures” (Prater i).

Vol. 2: El Numero Uno by Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Mordecai’s El Numero Uno is, on the surface, a magical fable that follows the adventures of a teenage orphaned pig named Uno as he overcomes the malicious machinations of twins Eddiebeast and Freddiebeast in order to save the village of Lopinot. The play contends with themes of disguise, identity, recognition, and social collaboration, while accentuating its vibrant Caribbean context through linguistic diversity, extensive music and dance scenes, and masquerade. Although El Numero Uno is set in and inspired by a rich Caribbean landscape, it is nevertheless a product of transnational and diasporic origins. In her introduction to El Numero Uno, Rachel Mordecai highlights the play’s dialogic fluidity as it moves between “English and a non-specific anglophone Caribbean language bearing markers of both Jamaican and Trinidadian creoles, with regular interpolations of French and Spanish,” and offers valuable insights into the importance of Canada, as a site of cultural multiplicity, to this stylistic, textual, and linguistic hybridity (Mordecai ii). Despite its status as “an artifact of its turn-of-the-century moment,” Rachel Mordecai contends that El Numero Uno’s “achievement lies partly in its skillful transposition of Caribbean social and cultural elements into a realm just outside of any particular place and time, such that its wit, whimsy, joyous energies and salutary messages can be rendered accessible through a variety of stagings for a variety of audiences now and yet to come” (Mordecai ii). El Numero Uno is perhaps the most accessible play in our collection and is, we would suggest, an abstracted yet deeply Caribbean production suitable for readers of all ages.

Vol. 3: Champagne and Sky Juice by Basil Dawkins

Finally, Basil Dawkins’s Champagne and Sky Juice is a historically grounded examination of Jamaica’s social and political situation in 1980, as dramatized through the complex partnership of the middle-class Gregory and Beverly. Their relationship is framed by their respective allegiances to the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Mervyn Morris, in his introduction, extends the oppositional association to the title itself, which

alludes to differing environments. ‘Champagne’ suggests celebration, privilege, and expense. ‘Sky juice’ suggests limited resources – in Jamaica, shaved ice sold in a plastic bag with a straw and a little syrup. In this two-hander, one sky juice denizen, Gregory, imagines himself, through political connections, to be sipping champagne soon; the other, Beverly, is doggedly self-reliant. (Morris i)

Through the domestic tensions generated by Gregory’s JLP-aligned desire for upward mobility and Beverly’s PNP-influenced commitment to self-reliance and solidarity, the play dramatizes the ideological conflicts that defined Jamaica’s 1980 election and its immediate aftermath. Champagne and Sky Juice’s setting in a middle-class living room becomes both literal and metaphorical ground for examining national transformations, as Gregory’s political disillusion and Beverly’s practical resilience reflect competing visions for Jamaica’s economic and social development.

Future Plans

Over the coming months and years, Manchineel + Seagrape intends to add new plays to its catalogue, along with additional contextual material such as interviews, videos, and more. As this project grows, we hope it will serve as an essential resource in preserving Caribbean drama. To learn about Manchineel + Seagrape and to download the plays, visit https://journals.flvc.org/MS/index.

Michael R. Soriano is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Miami, researching nineteenth- and twentieth-century serial media. He is also the 2024–25 UM Digital Humanities Fellow.