Fresh form to suit myriad ideas in Beyene Haile's Heart-to-Heart Talk

This article probes the production of Beyene Haile's play Weg'i Libi (‘Heart-to-Heart Talk’) to contextualize some seemingly provincial contemporary concerns that in fact are relevant throughout Africa. Written in one of the Eritrean languages, Tigrinya, Weg'i Libi (2008) comes with a fresh form, which includes various elements from western classical to other various modern and African traditional performance forms examining a myriad of national and continental contemporary concerns such as migration, power consolidation, aesthetics, and oral tradition, which hinder it from immediate production. Though written by a prominent author, unlike government-sponsored productions with professional actors, this play was staged by amateur university students after it was rejected for professional production.