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Kegedawan (The Gift)

nytheatre.com review by Kyle Ancowitz
August 15, 2005

Anticipating a gift, I splashed down East 4th Street through a furious summer downpour to explore a Philippine rainforest onstage at the Connelly Theatre. Creator/director Denise Montgomery, choreographer Ruffy Landayan, and the athletic ensemble of Kegedawan (The Gift) expend a lot of energy in this dance-theatre bio-play, but after 60 minutes I still felt like I’d missed out on the title’s promise.Kegedawan is based on Wisdom From A Rainforest, the memoirs of Stuart Schlegel. A clergyman and part-time ethnographer, Schlegel took a break from his calling and his family to document the culture of the Figel Teduray, an isolated but peaceful rainforest-dwelling tribe. Montgomery is emphatic that Schlegel’s life and experiences are a rebuke to Western individualism and its resultant materialism and violence, going so far as to call him the greatest inspiration of her life and share his “quest for compassion, peace, and social change.”Schlegel’s depiction in the play is not entirely uncritical. The audience has a number of opportunities to wonder if he’s got his priorities straight. The very first scene shows him risking his six-year-old son’s life for his fascination with the Teduray, and I’ll always wonder—until I read the book—why his wife put up with him. Still, Montgomery regards his determination to reconcile one calling with another, to document the world of the Teduray and restructure his Christian faith to match what he’s seen, with real reverence. The Stuart character, played with unblinking earnestness by a masked G. Ivan Smith, politely tells his bishop to take his Lord and shove it (twice!) because he doesn’t need some pencil-neck ecclesiastical bureaucrat to show him the Christ in his own heart.I can’t doubt that Schlegel’s personal convictions are inspirational since he’s inspired his own show in the Fringe, but I’d like to have seen a little more of what really turned him on. Apart from a retelling of the Teduray creation myth, there isn’t much in Kegedawan that feels particular to those people. The image of a Motown diva is utilized for a sequence in which our “civilized” Western horror of transsexualism is laughingly dismissed by the Teduray…but what’s rainforest about Gladys Knight? Coarse masks designed by Kat Lasky and worn by each ensemble member serve to generalize the characters more than distinguish them. I’m sure that Schlegel has a finely delineated notion of how the Teduray are different from any people he has or ever will meet, but I haven’t grasped it yet.But wait, what about the gift from the title? It’s not the Teduray, because there sadly aren’t any left. It isn’t Schlegel himself, though you can purchase his book from the website in the program. If you catch this play based on Wisdom From A Rainforest, staged by the Wisdom Theatre Company, you may find some gift to take away, but you’ll have to search a little harder than I could.