photo : ed la borde 20 worldliteraturetoday.org wlt interview January–February 2014 • 21 Erika J. Waters: You’ve been connected with the theater from a very young age, since growing up on the island of Montserrat, haven’t you? David Edgecombe: Yes, I’ve had a long love affair with theater. It was unavoidable in Montserrat where theater was everywhere—from street theater to formal productions. I grew up in the heart of Plymouth, the capital, where all the colorful characters hung out. Almost never a day went by without street theater, and all of the schools regularly put on plays from books. Other organizations —the nurses, the police, the churches, and the Defense Force [the military]—often made up their own plays. In fact, my first principal at the Montserrat Secondary School, Vincent Browne, wrote over fifty one-act plays for the Defense Force, and Eudora, one of my sisters, wrote at least one play. EJW: That’s an exciting environment for a young writer . . . D avid Edgecombe was born in Montserrat in 1952 and attended Niagara College in Ontario, Canada, and Concordia University in Montreal. For Better, For Worse, his first play, was produced in 1973 in Montserrat. Nearly a dozen plays and adaptations have followed, including Making It (1975), Strong Currents (1977), Coming Home to Roost (1978), Kirnon’s Kingdom (1981), Heaven (1991), Marilyn (1998), Smile, Natives, Smile (2000), and Kill the Rabbits (2012). His plays have been staged in Canada and throughout the Caribbean from Guyana to Jamaica and many islands in between. In addition, Strong Currents was staged in Nigeria (1997), and Kirnon’s Kingdom was broadcast on the BBC (1990). Heaven and Other Plays appeared in 1993; Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean (co-edited with Erika J. Waters) in 2002. Edgecombe has examined Caribbean domestic life, along with current public and political issues, in both comedies and dramas. He has accomplished this, as the critic Rawle Gibbons has noted in the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, “without ever descending into sentimentality or political idealism.” Edgecombe was director of the Reichhold Center for the Arts at the University of the Virgin Islands from 1992 to 2006 and currently teaches in the Communication, Art, and Theatre Division there. In 2008 he started a film production company, Cutting Edge Entertainment Inc., with Edward La Borde Jr. Edgecombe ardently champions Caribbean drama along with advocating for film and new media, which he is convinced is “the portal to an outburst of creativity such as we have only dreamed about in the Caribbean.” A Place for the Creative Imagination as Never Before” David Edgecombe on Theater, Film, and New Media in the Caribbean Erika J. Waters “ 22 worldliteraturetoday.org DE: Yes, and these homegrown plays always gave me a special surge of excitement, so that by age eleven, I was crafting and staging my own plays. I wrote my first script at thirteen. Soon after, the school asked me to write a play about an attempted slave rebellion in 1768. The play, though, was not produced, and the script was lost—until it was discovered twenty-five years later at a book fair. The script had been loaned by an American couple, the Hermans, who ran a bookstore when I was a boy. It was staged soon after for the first time. But when I was sixteen, my eldest sister, who was matron of the Glendon Hospital , asked me to direct Errol Hill’s Strictly Matrimony for the hospital’s annual concert. It was a huge honor for me, of course. EJW: So, you were directing that early, then— which I know you’ve done throughout your career. Your first play, For Better, For Worse, was produced in 1973, and it’s been popular ever since—produced as recently as last month. What does that reveal about Caribbean culture or values? DE: Well, it probably reveals more about the play itself than about Caribbean values, honestly. While forty years is hardly enough to claim it has withstood the test of time, it has weathered better than most plays from that period. It’s a simple comedy about a young man and woman who want to have a...