In ‘Roll a Dice’, genotype’s impact on families takes centre stage

Fourth Party Playhouse, a theatre company, has beamed the spotlight on the effect of genotype on marriages.

‘Roll of Dice’, a stage play, tells the story of middle-aged, uneducated parents whose uninformed decisions early in their lives came back to haunt them.

The parents ignorantly married without inquiring about each other’s genotype.

The couple rolled the titular dice, and fortune favoured them the first time; they had a girl — Omolokun — without the sickle cell gene.

However, the odds swung against them on the second roll, and their child — Ba’anu — wasn’t as lucky as he entered the world with SS genotype.

The circumstance forced the distressed parents to focus all their care and attention on Ba’anu and his continuous straddle between life and death.

Unknown to the parents, Omolokun, starved of parental attention, sought a semblance of care from Teacher Tomori, their glib-tongued and manipulative neighbour, who had a carnal desire for her.

Olalekan Adeniyi, the director and producer of the play, said the drama was inspired by the “terrible” experiences of people living with sickle cell anemia and their families that he had encountered in life.

“In my walk of life, when I was in school, even right now, I’ve had encounters with a lot of people living with sickle cell. I don’t have any in my family, but I’ve had friends and colleagues, and I see the stress that they go through. It’s terrible, and I think it’s not worth it. Whatever sacrifice one has to make sure that such never happens is a worthy sacrifice. That’s the main crust of the play,” he said.

“People should not gamble with the health of their prospective children by having a genotype that isn’t compatible with their lover’s when getting married. And aside from that, sickle cell is not only limited to the person living with it, but it also affects the entire family.”