After decades of producing a range of musicals, jazz shows, classical shows, drama, storytelling and other productions, achieving some 300 productions on stage and in television, and hosting international artistes and groups, Gem Madhoo-Nascimento, 70, is now focusing on educational theatre.
“As I wind up my career as a theatre producer, the six productions I have for 2025/2026 featuring the ethnicities in Guyana are all edutainment productions. ‘Twelfth Night, or What You Will’, a William Shakespeare play that will open on 12th April at 1 pm at the National Cultural Centre for schools is educational theatre. ‘Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Pleasant Career’ that I plan to stage in September is also educational”, Madhoo-Nascimento told Stabroek Weekend in a recent interview.
“Twelfth Night” is on the Caribbean Examinations Council’s syllabus. The Ministry of Education is sponsoring the play.
Her company, Gem’s Theatre Productions, previously staged “Twelfth Night” on three occasions between 2015 and 2018. In the upcoming staging, five shows will be held for schools with one in the evening on Saturday, 13th April for the public.
Noting her passion for history, literature, geography and current affairs, Madhoo-Nascimento said, “A lot of our young people know very little about our history. Theatre production is one way, I think, to make a lasting impression on their minds.”
Some 15 years ago, Madhoo-Nascimento said, businesswoman Marjorie Kirkpatrick had suggested she produce a play about the Chinese contribution to Guyana. It sparked an interest and she began researching the arrival of the Chinese in Guyana, but funding was an issue. Recently she came across some of her research and gave it a second thought. “I spoke with the Chinese ambassador who supports it,” she said.
With the research now complete, Harold Bascom, five-time winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature – Drama, including this year, is scripting it for stage and a director has been appointed. Staging is scheduled for January 12, 2025 in keeping with the arrival day of the first batch of Chinese to Guyana.
Another play will be scripted dealing with the arrival of East Indians to Guyana and staged next year in May. Others will follow.
Tribute to Michael Gilkes
When the late playwright and author Michael Gilkes shot footage for the film “Maira and the Jaguar People” he named Madhoo-Nascimento the producer after his first choice fell through. Unfortunately, Gilkes succumbed to Covid-19 in April 2020 and the project is in need of financing for editing. Gilkes, who was overseas-based, spent months in Surama in Region Eight where he scripted the film that tells about the lifestyle, habitat and art form of storytelling of the Indigenous peoples in the area. Some 99% of the cast are from Surama where he taught them the art of acting.
“We never had a local film produced with an all Indigenous cast. It is supposed to be a short film that can be shown internationally because of the quality of the filming. The two videographers were from Canada and Colombia. The musician/soundman, a Cuban, is known as the Michael Jackson of Cuba. A 50-piece orchestra did the orchestration for the film. When completed it is expected to be a good piece of work to showcase Guyana,” Madhoo-Nascimento said.
Last year, she staged Gilkes’ Guyana Prize winning play, “The Last of the Red Men”, in tribute to him.
Another of his plays, “A Pleasant Career”, which is about Edgar Mittelholzer’s life story, was the first play to win the Guyana Prize in Drama in 1992.
“I am trying to stage it during the last quarter of this year with funding from the Ministry of Culture. The play needs to be done from an educational and historical point of view. Mittelholzer did so much for writing and the literature scene in Guyana and the Caribbean. We are going to do some dramaturging of it,” Madhoo-Nascimento said.
She recalled that when Gilkes performed “The Last of the Red Men”‘ in the Cayman Islands in the late 2000s he did it as a one-man play. The Gem’s Theatre Production staging last year brought in other characters, including a reporter and four children.
She stated that she worked with Gilkes for the first time when he produced his play “Couvade” in 1993. “It was a celebration of the return to free and fair elections.”
A long-time supporter of the Guyana Prize for Literature, this year was the first time Madhoo-Nascimento was asked to be a judge. She performed this task in the drama category, and judged from a producer’s angle. “I looked at the plays I thought would grab the audience and that would not be too technically challenging,” she said. “I discovered a lot of writers are influenced by television. They have to remember they are writing for the stage. Some of the plays had many scenes which would make them a nightmare to present. One play was presented as a musical, but it was good for a television series.”
Filmmaking, sitcom
Madhoo-Nascimento’s first experience with film production was “Mustard Bath” (1993), which was filmed in Guyana by a Canadian group. “I got the actors together to read and cast,” she recalled.
In 1996, she was the Guyana stringer for a BBC TV crew that made a documentary on the life of Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, whose book of poetry was used in the education system in England.
Between 2007 and 2010 she conducted a workshop with some young people on theatrical productions with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency. Skits were done on domestic violence, trafficking in persons, HIV, solid waste management and littering. “We took those skits from Rosignol to Bartica on weekends performing in various schools,” she said.
The National AIDS Programme Secretariat sponsored the play done on HIV and it was made into a short film. “Some of the participants are still in theatre. Nuryyiha Gerrard, Sean Budnah, Keona McKay. One of them, Clinton Duncan, is into fashion and modelling and is on the runway in New York. Four of them are performing in ‘Twelfth Night’,” she revealed.
Madhoo-Nascimento produced three seasons of “Days like Dese” between 2019 and 2023. “Now, I’m working on the fourth season. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is on board with it. As a sitcom, it is one of the best ways to get messages over to people. By engaging the Foreign Affairs Ministry, I thought I could educate people on the whole Guyana-Venezuela issue. There are now 49 episodes on YouTube for the last three seasons.”
Season four of “Days like Dese” should be out by the third quarter of 2024.
Beginnings in theatre
Madhoo-Nascimento was working at the Guyana National Cooperative Bank (GNCB) and felt she wanted to do something else in her free time. In 1974, she joined the Public Service Union Drama Group at the invitation of a member. Initially, some members were not receptive to her, because she was not a member of the union.
Veteran playwright/actor/journalist Francis Farrier headed the drama group.
When she joined, the group was doing three short plays, one of which was Sheik Sadeek’s, “Black Bush”.
“They needed a 12/13-year-old girl. The next thing you know I was on stage for the first time, acting as a 12/13 year at age 20/21. Francis took us in a bus on tours to Corriverton, Linden, Wakenaam, Essequibo Coast, Charity Market. We did open air theatre, street theatre. It was a good experience,” she recalled
In 1976 she was part of the production of the play, “Journey to Freedom” that was done for the independence anniversary celebration. When it was restaged at the Theatre Guild in 1978, she was the producer and she was encouraged to join the Theatre Guild.
Born in Aucklyne, Corentyne, Madhoo-Nascimento attended Aucklyne Primary School and Corentyne High School, now JC Chandisingh Secondary School. When the family moved from Aucklyne in 1968 to Britannia on the West Coast Berbice she stayed in Aucklyne to finish her secondary education.
Once she had completed high school, her father encouraged her to become a teacher like two of her older sisters. “I vowed I would never become a teacher. I incurred my parents’ wrath for months on end because I wasn’t getting a job,” she recalled.
Eventually she moved to Georgetown where she stayed with a cousin. She sent out several job applications without success. “I even worked as a store attendant and lasted for one week. Cutting a long story short, I went to see an uncle who was a high-profile person in the government at the time. That was how I got the job at GNCB,” she stated.
She was a teller at the counter for three years and felt she did an excellent job. “Even though I was very efficient at what I had to do, the promotion didn’t come. Even when my supervisor – who always said I was the best staff he had in the department – was absent and I took charge, still for years I didn’t get a promotion as a supervisor,” she said.
World tour
After several years at GNCB, Madhoo-Nascimento had accumulated six months of outstanding leave. As a 25 year-old she decided to spend her savings travelling the world. “My mother was horrified when I told her what I was doing,” she recalled.
When she lived in Aucklyne, some nights, she and her older sisters would climb through a window and place a mattress on top of the zinc roof that covered the kitchen which was an extension to the house. Lying there, they would talk about what they wanted to do when they grew up, while admiring the moon and skimming the skies for pitching meteors.
“My older sister who has since passed away, always said, ‘when you see a pitching star make a wish’,” she recalled. That sister’s repeated wish was to travel the world.
Her family had a globe and they used to discuss various countries. “That and my sister’s wish had an influence on me wanting to travel. The first opportunity I got was this long leave and I decided to travel. I took my savings to the travel agent and said I wanted to see how far this money would take me. We had friends and family in various places and I wrote to everybody asking who had who, in this and that country. I travelled as a single 25 to 26 year-old Guyanese Indian woman which probably never happened before, even hitchhiking in some places,” she reminisced. “I went through Europe by rail from France to Holland going down to Italy, Belgium, Greece, Spain and Switzerland. I travelled cheaply staying with relatives and friends, at pension houses, at YWCA accommodations where you paid a dollar a night. In Egypt, India and Greece I stayed with family. I went to Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan. I couldn’t get a US visa and so I went to Mexico, Costa Rica and back to Guyana. I was in Spain when my leave was up, but I still had all these tickets booked and so I travelled for eight months.”
On her return to Guyana she found a job in the insurance business.
“I wasn’t happy with an eight-to-four job to be honest. I wanted to have flexible hours on the job. Insurance worked well for me for a while, until we started the Theatre Company,” she said.
Professional theatre
Madhoo-Nascimento and director, actor, broadcaster Ron Robinson started the Theatre Company, which was a legally registered company, on 1st November, 1981.
“We introduced professional theatre in this country making it a business. Prior to that, theatre was all voluntary. I was also in the business management side of things because of my background in banking and accounts. We had a legal contract for payment drawn up by a law firm that was signed by everyone who was in a production, for payment from revenue earned from the production,” she said.
The Theatre Company toured the Caribbean and the USA between 1982 and 2002 to stage shows. “No other theatrical company had done this before in Guyana. In Guyana, we also gave part proceeds from our opening nights to charity,” she said.
“Over the years I’ve produced and co-produced roughly 300 productions. I don’t think anyone else has ever done that in this country.”
When she left the Theatre Company after 20 years, as the primary producer, she had done about 150 productions.
She produced Dave Martins musical, “All in One” which was sponsored by GT&T for the country’s 40th independence anniversary.
The Theatre Company also staged Dave Martins’ “Raise Up” in1990. The Ministry of Education had commissioned him to stage it in 1988 for the 100th anniversary of Indian immigration to Guyana and African emancipation from slavery.
“Dave said to me and Ron he had ‘Raise Up’ that he had done so much research into and the ministry had done nothing with it. He asked us if we would like to produce it and we did it in 1990,” she said. “We took the group of actors and the musical director to the Cayman Islands and to eight states of the USA on a one-month tour performing at universities. We had slide projections showing the conditions under slavery and indentureship. In Cleveland, Mississippi, before the intermission a number of White lecturers walked out of the theatre. We went to Michigan State University, New York, Virginia, Miami. Washington DC. ‘Raise Up’ was a historic production.”
Madhoo-Nascimento co-founded Prime Time Advertising Agency which was the first to have a video production studio in Guyana. She took part in the annual satirical review, Stretch Out Magazine that was produced for television every December while she was at Prime Time and the Theatre Company.
She left the Theatre Company in 2002 and started Gem’s Theatre Productions.
Over the years, she has hosted several international groups including Paul Keens Douglas and his top ten from Trinidad and Tobago and has done several tours. “When I co-produced Michael Gilkes ‘Last of the Red Men’, we took it to Trinidad, St Lucia and Barbados,” she said
She took the satirical show, “Half Past Late” in 2005 to Toronto, Canada.
She did the Hurricane Ivan Relief Concert for Grenada at the NCC. She coordinated the concert, an initiative of Guyanese Keith Waithe from London, for the Guyana Relief Council in 2005 held at the National Park.
She has also assisted in fund-raising for the local rugby fraternity. “I got the ruggers running the bar, helping with security at the NCC and even holding doors sometimes,” she said.
Tourism
Apart from banking, insurance, advertising and the gamut of theatrical productions, this multifaceted career woman managed the Hurakabra River Resort on the Essequibo River from 2006 to 2022 after which she and her husband Christopher ‘Kit’ Nascimento sold it to a Guyanese Canadian who has kept it as a tourism facility. The Nascimentos still frequent the resort.
Madhoo-Nascimento still plays her role in tourism through her handbook, “Guyana – Where & What”, which she has published annually since the 2007 Cricket World Cup with the exception of 2020/2021 when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak. She is proud to now be working on her 16th publication.
Madhoo-Nascimento has received several awards for theatre productions, as well as the Young Women’s Christian Association ‘Women of Distinction Award’, an enabler award from the Guyana Cultural Association of New York and a lifetime achievement award from the Institute of Creative Arts, Ministry of Culture.
Madhoo-Nascimento was the longest serving non-paid secretary of the Guyana Motor Racing Club from 1982 to 1992. She was also active with United Women for Special Children, a charitable organisation that nearly collapsed due to conflicting issues among its members. She played a major role in keeping the club going.
“Right now I am also doing research for my husband’s book and I have to twist his arms to get some things done,” she said.
