Review of Look What Fell out De Mango Tree: A Powerful new Play about Family Secrets and more...

Actors Debra and Chris Grossett on Stage

"You do NOT want to miss this Jamaican drama. 'This is a great two-person, Jamaican play. A really wonderful story, completely different from the normal plays we are known for!

'Look What Fell Out De Mango Tree' tells the story of Debra's own life and her relationship with her father, in song and a funny, stirring and emotional dialogue. 

Debra says: "Chris and I are beyond excited to be taking Look What Fell Out De Mango Tree to London this September! If you have friends or family in London, I would be so grateful if you'd share this with them. Word of mouth means everything to a new production, and your support truly helps. Thank you for cheering me on and helping make this dream come true! One love."

A powerful two actor show of love, guilt, betrayal, and family secrets, One of the many events in the show as that of the father daughter/wife relationship. A father who was unable to show up and yet a father who loved his daughter. On the occasions when he was present, he told her how much he loved her, almost as though the words were a silent plea from his soul. But he could not express that love through the everyday actions a child needs. He was absent from school events, birthdays and many of the significant moments that eventually become our memories, whether good or bad. Behind his absence lay another story: his addiction to alcohol. This was more than drinking. Alcohol became a refuge, a place of comfort and escape from a childhood wound that had shaped his understanding of love, life and family. Rejection. Loneliness. Disappointment. The cycle continued to repeat itself. He had grown up as one of nine children, yet he alone was sent away to live with strangers because his mother claimed she could not care for them all. How could a child make sense of being the one chosen to leave? He could not understand why his mother treated him differently, or why she would not even call him by his name, referring to him instead as “the one with the dark eyes.” Beneath her rejection was a painful family secret, one whose full meaning is gradually and powerfully revealed.

What the young boy understood was that he could no longer grow up beside his brothers and sisters. Somewhere inside him took root the devastating belief that his mother did not love him as she loved her other children. That rejection slowly eroded his sense of worth and, perhaps without him realising it, helped shape the man, husband and father he would eventually become.

Actors Debra and Chris Grossett on Stage

When a Child Learns That Love Doesn't Stay

Then we see the impact on his little girl.

Her daddy told her how much he loved her, yet he was rarely there — at school, at birthday parties or even when he was supposed to pick her up. Imagine what that teaches a child about love. Imagine how she felt around her friends. They knew. They saw. Yet she had to show up for her. She learned to show up ..for her and her mother. She grew into a woman who needed to control her own destiny when it came to love and men. Somewhere along the way, resentment crept in. When a man declared his love for her, she pushed him away. She moved from relationship to relationship, often arriving at the same outcome: if he loved her, she ran.

Love. Pain. Rejection. Run. - Repeat. The cycle kept revolving.

This little girl's earliest reference point had taught her that love didn't stick around. That opening yourself up to love also meant preparing yourself to lose it.

And this, for me, was one of the most powerful elements of the play. It asks us to look beyond behaviour and ask a much deeper question:

What happened before? What wound are we looking at? What experience taught this person to love this way? And sometimes, we simply don't want to know because a wound can fester, and if you open up Pandora's box, what else lies in there and do we have the capacity to face it all?

A Mother Raising a Son

The play also explores the relationship between Debra and her son after she leaves his father, and how she navigates raising a boy while still trying to understand her own relationship with men. There is an interesting juxtaposition here.

She has a man in her home whom she loves deeply, her son, while almost playing a game of blackjack with her own romantic relationships. Yet ultimately, it is her son who notices the pattern, who challenges her. Who encourages his mother to face the demons she has spent years carrying. To speak to her father. To confront the pain of his absence and, importantly, to ask the questions she had never been able to ask:

Why?

What happened to you? What made you the way you were?

There is something incredibly powerful about reaching the point where we can move beyond simply asking, "Why did you do this to me?" and begin asking, "What happened to you?" It doesn't erase the hurt. It doesn't excuse the behaviour.

But sometimes understanding where another person's pain began can help us understand where our own pain came from.

The Weight Women Carried

The play also shines a light on the extraordinary weight so many women had to carry. Families where fathers were absent and sometimes families where fathers were physically there, but emotionally they were not present.

Women simply had to get on with it.

There were children to raise, bills to pay, homes to hold together and lives to survive.

In that environment, love wasn't always something soft and fluffy. Sometimes there simply wasn't the luxury of sitting down and examining feelings.

You survived. You provided. You picked up the pieces and smiled through it all.

You carried on. And love? the exhaustion of just providing drew love away into the world of fantasy or to God. And perhaps that is why generations of families became incredibly resilient, while simultaneously carrying wounds they never had the opportunity or perhaps even the language to address.

Extraordinary Performances in Look What Fell out De Mango Tree: A Powerful new Play about Family Secrets

The acting was enthralling. Both actors moved through a myriad of characters, dipping and weaving effortlessly between different personalities, generations and emotions.

There was something wonderfully casual about those transitions. The characters changed before us while the story continued to unfold within our own minds.

We weren't simply watching a story. We were being invited to recognise pieces of families, communities and perhaps even ourselves.

And then there was the music. I loved the way the play was punctuated by the music of Bob Marley, Gregory Isaacs and other artists from that era. The music wasn't simply a soundtrack. It carried memory. It gave the production a wonderful sense of homecoming transporting us back to a particular time, place and feeling.

Bring This Play Back to London

Look What Fell out De Mango Tree: A Powerful new Play about Family Secrets is a play must come back to London. Because underneath everything else, it asks us to do something that sounds incredibly simple but can be extraordinarily difficult:

Tell our stories.

Find someone you trust and speak about the trauma. Speak about the pain. Speak about the things families sometimes spend generations pretending never happened. Or seek a therapist or counsellor. No one needs to know your business in terms of your healing journey and these people are qualified experts, so they are sworn to confidentiality.

It also reminds us why we must remain committed to bringing back the village.

The village was once central to creating balance within families and communities. It provided guidance, accountability, support and the wisdom of elders.

But we also understand something now that perhaps we didn't acknowledge enough before. Being older does not necessarily mean being healed. And being older does not always mean being wiser. Because pain blocks. Pain hardens. Pain numbs.

If pain is never addressed, it can travel through generations disguised as discipline, silence, anger, addiction, abandonment or simply, "That's just the way I am."

That is why we have to fight for community.

We have to fight for unity. We have to fight for family.

And we have to create spaces where people know that talking about their pain is okay. Because holding space for someone to speak from those intimate, fragile and sometimes broken places is not weakness. Sometimes it is where healing begins.

And perhaps that is the greatest message I took away from this play.

Behind the adult who couldn't show up was once a little boy wondering why his mother had sent him away. Behind the woman who kept running from love was once a little girl waiting for her daddy to arrive.

At some point, somebody has to interrupt the cycle.

Somebody has to ask the questions.

Somebody has to tell the story.

And somebody has to decide that the pain will not simply be handed down to the next generation.

Flyer for play Look What Fell out of De Mango Tree

Esther with Debra

Written and Performed by Debra Ehrhardt

Directed by Oscar & Grammy Winner Paul Williams