Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✭✭
by d’bi.young, directed by Weyni Mengesha
Theatre Passe Muraille/Obsidian Theatre Company, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
November 15-27, 2005
A “bloodclaat” (“blood cloth”) is a cloth for soaking up menstrual blood. It’s also a strong curse word in Jamaica. That such fear and loathing should be associated with a woman’s period is the subject of d’bi.young’s powerful 70-minute one-woman play that seeks to exorcise the curse from “the Curse” to reveal it as a blessing.
The play is a meditation on the many contexts and connotations of blood--menstruation, murder, sacrifice, ancestry, salvation, childbirth. The story follows Mudgu, a bright, lively teenaged girl in Jamaica, punished by her grandmother for staining her bedsheet and shunned by her Rastafarian boyfriend for being “unclean”. Everything conspires to hold her back--the country’s endemic violence, her aunt’s piety, her uncle’s lasciviousness--everything except her memories of her mother now in Canada, Yoruban culture and the inspiration of Queen Nanny, a black Jamaican who led her people in the struggle against slavery.
Young is a charismatic performer who channels her fierce intensity into each of the dozen sharply differentiated characters she plays. Weyni Mengesha directs the show with great imagination and flair, and amina alfred’s live music skillfully underscores Mudgu’s gradual liberation from the closed-mindedness surrounding her to a luminous sense of self and the interconnectedness of things.
Addendum: blood.claat has since become part 1 of the sankofa trilogy first performed with the other two parts November 23, 26, 27 and December 3, 2011 at the Tarragon Theatre.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2005-12-15.
Photo: d’bi.young. ©2005 Aviva Armour-Ostroff.
2005-11-24
blood.claat - one womban story