The gossip queen, the feuding sisters, the drunk hobo, and the imposter are characters that can show up in any story about life in a tightly-knit community, but playwright-director Raymond G. Wilson does a successful job at developing the sensibilities and frailties of these characters in his community theater play Tenement Junction.

Wilson, a native of Guyana, set his play in a fictitious location somewhere in the Caribbean. At first, it bothered me that I couldn't place this "Manitoba" geographically, but as the plot developed, its authentic location on the map became less and less important. This "Manitoba" was more figurative than anything else. Regardless of the country, there are some intrinsic values associated with people living in a tenement: an often overcrowded apartment house in a poor section of a city.

Tenement Junction served up the story of a tenement full to overflowing with tenants who couldn't manage to pay the rent, constantly being harassed by their aging landlord, living with feuding neighbors who stick their nose where it doesn't belong and chiding children not because you are parents but because it takes a village to raise a child.

Is this not life anywhere in the Caribbean, or even in similar communities around the world?

The Utopian Dramatists, the theater group employed for this production pulled actors who currently reside in the Greater New York area, but originate from all over the diaspora. As a result, if as an audience member you are very familiar with the subtle differences across the array of Caribbean dialects, then you would have been a bit thrown off the path because of the merging of the many accents and popular regional proverbs.

Still, I can side with Wilson in using this play as a humorous, pro-social awareness tool for those who - because of fierce loyalism - tend to alienate oneself from other members of Caribbean nations. But, are we not all so painfully similar?

Do we not all know what it means to fight over inherited land? Or receive barrels from overseas filled with canned corned beef and baby diapers? Or tease posers who return from England and think they can "carry on" the British traditions in a down-home setting?

While the story dragged on for about three hours (a bit too long for the audience, even with the authentic humor) there were precious morsels that gave the story a unique quality.

The vignette featuring an itinerant preacher who seemed a bit too uneducated to be a man of the cloth portrayed how hustles can originate from the most sacred of places.

This pastor would visit the tenement each Sunday and supposedly conduct private services for those willing to pay his $10 per head surcharge. While he claims to also have many other parishioners around the town, Brenda Beasley (Krissan Johnson), the wife of a sailor who is out to sea and Luella (Lorraine Phillipe), a single woman who recently returned from England are his two parishioners on site at the tenement. 

Soon, neighbors discover what truly goes on during these private services and the reveal is the most dramatic and hilarious scene in the entire play. Arms flailing, chests heaving and fists flying.

All in all, as a first installment in the Tenement Junction Series, we were taught enduring lessons of the power of ownership and communal living. Regardless of the western ideals of individualism and self-reliance, the members of this community fight life not on the basis of the individual's will, but on the basis of a community's combined strength.