Being Chaka Will Pull You In and Stay with You
By Dani Daniela, Triangle Review
We didn't want it to end.
Being Chaka, presented by Burning Coal Theatre Company and TÉA Artistry and directed by Vieve Radha Price and Chuk Obasi, holds emotional weight without collapsing under it. Tara Amber, Chuk Obasi, and Nalini Sharma's script is direct and layered. The story doesn't chase tidy resolution. It gives space. It asks questions. It keeps you awake and looking inward.
The space itself is alive. The actors move through the aisles, across levels, into seats, behind shoulders. The balcony, the corners of the room, even silence itself becomes part of the setting. You don't just watch this story. You feel inside of it. You are asked to listen differently. To stay alert. To not miss what could be happening behind you.
Jarred Pearce, as Chaka, begins the story in verse. Words stretch and wind through memory, hinting at both clarity and confusion. Before he speaks, though, Joe Reese as Willy is already in motion. Already walking. Already questioning. He moves with cadence in his step, like his body is carrying something that only he knows. He is not just wandering. He is marking time.
Nikki Dublin Turner, as Purilla, Willy's ghost-wife, begins silently. Then her voice enters. Her presence grows. What begins as a dream that Chaka seems to witness becomes a vision that he enters. Then it becomes a world he reacts to. The ghosts begin in silence. Then they speak. Then they guide. The arc is not sudden. It builds. The lines between past and present, dream and reality, begin to blur. And like Chaka, we start to question what to trust and what to carry.
There were moments that left me confused. Movement I couldn't place. Scenes that seemed to arrive without warning. I kept asking, am I missing something? But the longer I sat with that, the more I realized that that was part of the work. The play confuses us on purpose. There is chaos. There is disorder. There is dream-logic. Because sometimes the dreams we are raised on, even the ones dressed up as the American Dream, do not make sense when we try to live them out loud.