In the intimate confines of McMillan Memorial Library, Wakio Mzenge commands the stage alone, inhabiting twelve distinct characters in John Sibi Okumu’s Elements, a theatrical tour de force that transforms one woman’s trauma into universal testimony. This solo piece, currently on tour, demonstrates the profound power of minimalist theatre to excavate the deepest human experiences and present them with unflinching honesty.
“Elements” unfolds exactly one year after a death that is yet to be revealed to the audience haunts protagonist Dana’s carefully constructed world. What begins as an imagined academic lecture of her life, complete with whiteboard notes serving as a roadmap through memory, gradually reveals itself as something far more personal and devastating. Dana, a successful woman whose composed exterior masks profound scars, uses the framework of a career retrospective to guide us through the formative people and places that shaped her identity.
The brilliance of the play lies in its deceptive simplicity. The whiteboard becomes both a literal prop and a metaphorical framework, with each name and location promising revelation while building toward an emotional crescendo that recontextualizes everything we’ve witnessed.
The play’s examination of multiracial identity, Dana’s heritage spanning Indian-Kenyan and Irish-Caribbean roots, creates a character who exists in the spaces between categories. While this ambitious scope occasionally threatens to stretch the character beyond believable specificity, it serves the larger theme of displacement and the search for belonging in a world that struggles to place those who don’t fit neat classifications.
Wakio Mzenge’s performance is nothing short of extraordinary. Her ability to flow seamlessly between twelve distinct characters creates a theatrical experience that feels less like watching one actress and more like witnessing an entire ensemble emerge from a single body. Each character transition is marked by subtle but precise shifts in posture, voice, and energy that allow audiences to immediately understand who occupies the stage at any given moment.
Wakio’s performance builds methodically toward the final revelation that her son Stephane died a year ago, where her carefully maintained composure finally crumbles in a raw display of maternal grief that leaves the audience in stunned silence.
The actress’s commitment to allowing Dana to “live her life” on stage creates an authenticity that is felt by the audience. When she curls up on the library couch, the gesture feels so natural, so untheatrically human, that you almost want to go up and hold her.
Stuart Nash‘s direction embraces the radical choice of emptiness, allowing Wakio to occasionally leave the performance space entirely. This bold decision reinforces that we’re not watching a traditional theatrical event but rather being invited into someone’s private psychological landscape. The direction trusts both performer and audience to sustain engagement through pure storytelling power rather than visual spectacle.
The choice of a library setting proves inspired on multiple levels. Beyond the obvious connection to Dana’s identity as an author who incorporates passages from her own work, the library’s inherent intimacy transforms what could have been merely a venue into an integral part of the storytelling apparatus. The space itself becomes a character, with Wakio holding eye contact with audience members, making us feel like characters ourselves in Dana’s world.
The lighting design functions as an emotional barometer, shifting from warm brightness during moments of paternal connection to angry red during scenes of violation and trauma. Sound design proves equally crucial, with music that rises to match Dana’s desperation in the climactic scenes. 
“Elements” succeeds brilliantly in its exploration of how trauma shapes identity while examining the particular challenges faced by those whose heritage defies easy categorization. The play asks profound questions about belonging, survival, and the price of maintaining composure in a world that demands emotional performance from grieving people.
John Sibi Okumu’s script, described by the playwright as “a response to the hard knocks in life,” demonstrates that suffering transcends gender while acknowledging that responses to loss remain deeply human regardless of the sufferer’s identity. The revelation that Dana has been processing her son’s death adds retrospective weight to every moment, transforming what initially appears to be a career and life reflection into an elaborate form of grief management.
While “Elements” achieves remarkable emotional impact, its ambitions occasionally work against its effectiveness. Dana’s multicultural background, while providing rich material for exploring displacement and identity, sometimes feels overly constructed, an attempt to represent too many experiences within a single character. The universality of such broad representation risks diluting the specificity that makes individual trauma genuinely affecting.
Wakio Mzenge succeeds in giving Dana space to live her life for the one hour the audience encounters her. By the final blackout, Dana’s individual journey has become a meditation on resilience, identity, and the ongoing process of becoming human in a world that offers no guarantees about what we might be required to endure.
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