Acts of Faith: a battle
between good and evil

Play succeeds as an outstanding live-streamed performance

By Faith Langston

November 4, 2021

Acts of Faith, directed by Nina Lee Aquino and written by David Lee, is a virtual triumph. Crafted for camera, the play succeeds as an outstanding live-streamed performance.

Natasha Mumba portrays a personage named Faith who grapples with the encumbrance and the accompanying elation of a spiritual heritage. “Do people sin”, she asks “to be ready for confession?” On her journey from the African Copper belt to the backwoods of Muskoka, Faith, a prophet who can perform miracles, undertakes to engage in the battle between good and evil. The text of the play moves from sacred to profane, from hilarity to the sobering issue of sexual abuse practised by ‘men of God’.

This one-woman play makes use of many personages. Faith’s character uses Canadian parlance for the narrative of the play and African accents to convey the thoughts of her mother, her relatives and the priest.

Jonna Yu’s realistic backdrop, a bed and furniture, offsets the many flights of fancy in the text. The atmospheric lighting by Michelle Ramsay and sound design by Miquelon Rodriguez help carry Mumba’s riveting performance. This one-woman play makes use of many personages. Faith’s character uses Canadian parlance for the narrative of the play and African accents to convey the thoughts of her mother, her relatives and the priest.

How do you lose your faith? You don’t. It just leaves you like a room someone moved out of. Lee is obviously sympathetic to the disillusionment of youth, familiar with the mesmerizing power of fantasy and the large, sometimes irreconcilable gap, which exists between cultural identities.

Online until December 4.

factorytheatre.ca

Feature image: Dahlia Katz

Read also: other articles by Faith Langston

Faith Langston is a Concordia graduate with a long-standing interest in theatre. For the last ten years, she has worked as a literacy tutor with the Jamaican Association.