Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Djanet Sears
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
June 29-September 22, 2006
"A Landmark Production at Stratford"
Djanet Sears’s “Harlem Duet” is an important play and its production is an important event at the Stratford Festival. It is the first work written by an African-Canadian author to be produced in the Festival’s history. It is the first to be directed there by a black woman. And it is the first there ever with an all-black cast. Historical firsts alone should draw our attention but it is the powerful performances of the two principals that make the experience gripping despite what one must admit is rather heavy-handed direction from the author.
“Harlem Duet” premiered in Toronto in 1997 and won numerous awards including a Dora, a Chalmers and a Governor General’s Award for Best New Play. It is imagined as a prequel to Shakespeare’s “Othello”, where we meet Othello’s first wife, an African-American woman named Sybil, called “Billie” for short, whom Othello throws over in favour of a white woman named “Mona”. In order to show the timelessness of the situation, Sears sets the play in three distinct periods. Most of the action occurs in the present in the Harlem apartment Othello and Billie share at the symbolic corner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Boulevards. We are not in the world of the military but in the vicious world of academia where Othello has just won tenure over a white candidate “Chris Iago”. Leaving Billie, a graduate student and his wife of nine years, to marry Mona, seems to set a seal on Othello’s assimilation into the hierarchy of the white world.
Interspersed with the action in the present are flashbacks to the early, happier years of Othello and Billie’s marriage. There are also glimpses back to the Harlem Renaissance in 1928 and the Frankie-and-Johnny relationship of “She” and “He”, the second being a classically trained actor who is about to put on blackface to appear in a minstrel show. Then there are glimpses further back to “Her” and “Him” in the American South in 1860, in which “Him” plans to escape with “Her” from the plantation to freedom in Canada, but backs out at the last moment not wanting to leave his white mistress.
The point of the three time periods and their reflection on issues in Shakespeare’s play is to underscore the tensions within any minority and the majority that surrounds them. Should those in the minority assimilate into the majority despite the past or present prejudice and oppression it has shown the minority, or should the minority maintain a stance of separateness as much as possible in order not to lose its sense of identity and origin? This is not a simple question and Sears does not present is as such. In fact, one of Sears’s achievements is to make clear how torturous a question this is for those who have to face it. Othello’s leaving Billie is enough to unbalance her, but his leaving her for a white woman literally drives her insane.
Sears counterbalances Billie’s response with those of “She” and “Her” in the past and Billie’s friends, her landlady Magi and sister-in-law Amah, in the present and her father Canada, who makes a surprise visit. All three in the present feel Billie’s reaction is too extreme, just as in Shakespeare’s play we feel Othello’s reaction is too extreme. Through Amah, the “raissonneur” figure in “Harlem Duet”, Sears brings up a theme that goes through all of Shakespeare’s plays, especially his late romances even if it not acted on, and that is forgiveness. Amah points out to Billie that the more you hate something the more you become defined by that hate, the more, in fact, you become just like the thing you hate.
The production is a triumph for Karen Robinson in the roles of Billie, She and Her. The intensity of her performance grabs you and never lets go, whether Billie is in the depths of depression, obsessively concocting a “magic” potion to poison Othello’s handkerchief, lucidly arguing with him about racial politics or raging out of control. At the same time, she clearly distinguishes the emotional labile Billie from the disdainful She and the passive Her.
Nigel Shawn Williams, who originated the roles of Sears’s Othello, He and Him in 1997, gives an excellent performance. Except for differences of dialect, his three characters are much more similar than are Robinson’s, but that seems to be part of Sears’s point. What Williams achieves the difficult task of garnering some measure of sympathy from us for his point of view. Sears has not written Othello as a villain and he makes clear that beneath their differences he still feels love for Billie, whose obsessiveness may have driven him out. His parting from her is painful for both of them. We feel less sympathy for Him, whose backing out seems cowardly, and he makes the moment that He begins to put on blackface, because the caricature is more acceptable that the real thing, absolutely chilling.
Barbara Barnes-Hopkins, who originated the role of Magi, is a welcome comic presence who is determined to have a baby within a year--all she has to do find the father. Walter Borden gives a solid performance as Canada, Billie’s reformed alcoholic, whose symbolic name and concern for Billie suggest she has an escape route that she willfully does not take. As Amah, newcomer Sophia Walker does not have the stage presence or vocal heft to match those of the rest of the cast, a pity since her character’s role of presenting Billie with a more rational view of her situation is so crucial.
Many scene changes are accompanied by Bryant Didier on bass and Robert Bardston on cello, reflecting the “duet” of the two principals in selections from classical to ragtime to jazz. Unfortunately, Sears as director does not leave it at this. Other scene changes are accompanied by a soundscape of excerpts of speeches by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Louis Farrakhan and other black leaders and personalities. This soundscape has the effect of drowning the production in footnotes. The central debates between Billie and Othello are already imbued with the philosophies and goals of these figures. While the soundscape clearly shows the context in which the characters’ arguments occur, the primacy for their expression in the theatre should come from the stage not the loudspeakers.
While Astrid Janson’s costumes instantly capture the period and personality of the characters, her set is uncharacteristically cluttered as it tries to represent all three time periods at once. Paul Mathiesen’s lighting is key in establishing changes of mood and focus.
While it is good that Stratford has finally presented “Harlem Duet”, it’s too bad it could not do so in tandem with a production of “Othello” to give visitors even more food for thought in relating the works to each other. Let’s hope that “Harlem Duet” is not just an aberration in programming but watershed at North America’s largest classical theatre festival for writers, directors and actors of colour. “Harlem Duet” is proof that there are powerful, eloquent stories out there that deserve as wide an audience as possible.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nigel Shawn Williams and Karen Robinson. ©David Hou.
2006-09-11
Harlem Duet