Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Nicole Brooks, directed by ahdri zhina mandiela
b current & Theatre Archipelago, 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture, Toronto
February 22-March 4, 2012
“Say ‘Yes’”
Nicole Brooks’ Obeah Opera is a hugely impressive work. Brooks, both composer and librettist, looks at the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93 from the perspective of its African-American victims, thus providing an alternative view of the events as depicted in Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible. Brooks matches that daunting project with an equally daunting structure. The piece has no dialogue--hence the designation “opera”--and no orchestra. It is a completely a cappella work for five female soloists and an all-female chorus of ten. The music is vibrant and emotional--whether, joyful, threatening or sorrowful--and written in a wide variety of tuneful styles from hymns and spirituals to chants to rhythm and blues and soul. This is a unique creation given passionate performances from the entire cast.
Those who recall The Crucible will remember that Miller includes one black character in his otherwise all-white cast--Tituba, a slave that Reverend Parris purchased in Barbados, who appears in only the first and last scenes of the play. Abigail Williams, the teenaged propagator of the rumours of witchcraft that will leads to several deaths, has Tituba prepare a potion to kill John Proctor’s wife, whom she sees as her rival, leads the local girls in love spells and tries to raise the spirits of dead children. By the end of the play Tituba has gone mad.
Tituba is the only character in Miller’s play whose actions could reasonably be called witchcraft by the Puritans. What Brooks does is to make Tituba her main character and to show that obeah that she would have practiced can only be considered “witchcraft” by those who do not or, worse, to do not want to understand it. While Obeah Opera focusses specifically on Tituba and her three friends, Brooks ultimate objective is to rehabilitate the notion of obeah, that even among some members of the African diaspora has negative associations.
Through the character of the Elder (played with imposing authority by Macomere Fifi, the first-ever crowned calypso queen of Canada), Brooks links obeah back to its origins as an art of healing and form of worship. It is not a synonym for voodoo as people both black and white have mistakenly assumed. When the Elder arrives at the start of the show, she says that what we will see is her story. Tituba and her friends greet the Elder with symbols of the four elements--earth, air, water and fire. In so doing Brooks establishes that obeah represents a universe and a way of thinking culturally poles apart from that of the Puritan world. The women bring this holistic world view with them from African to the Caribbean and from there to New England, where any non-Christian belief system is suspect.
The drama reaches a climax at Tituba’s trial where she is asked if she is a witch. Clearly, from her point of view she is not. She simply practices a religion that is part of the heritage the Puritans would like to stamp out. In her agony as to how to answer her accusers, the Elder tells her to say “Yes”. In their eyes she is a “witch”. By admitting it she forfeits her life but she also affirms her origins, her difference and her dignity. It is a harrowing scene beautifully rendered in Brooks’ music.
The soloists comes from varied backgrounds. Joni NehRita is immediately sympathetic as Tituba, her high voice suggesting both strength and fragility. She fully brings out the pain and the triumph of her character’s fateful decision at the trial. The composer herself sings Tituba’s friend Candy with a large expressive voice and an inspired gospel technique that brought out the house in her climactic song. Saidah Baba Talibah, who happens to be Salome Bey’s daughter, sings Tituba’s friend Mary and is already renowned as a soul/rock singer, evident in the power she brings to every song. Newcomer Saphire Demitro as Sarah proves that deep down even non-African-Canadians have the strength and grit to sing soul and blues if they free themselves to access their deepest emotions.
The choral work is a marvel in itself. How the singers can so precisely move from rhythm to rhythm without a visible conductor is amazing. Brooks establishes rhythms not just in the music itself but through foot stamping, hand-clapping, finger-snapping and, most eerily, through breathing and sighing. One remarkable scene shows Salem attacked by a fever where coughs and intakes of breath set up the rhythm.
Designer Julia Tribe has come up with a simple but exceeding clever way for the chorus to play both the African community and the Puritans. All the women of the chorus have reversible shawls--colourful on one side when they represent slaves, black-and-white on the reverse when they represent the Puritans. The changing of the shawls from one side to the other often signals a change in the music from spirituals for the slaves to hymns for the Puritans. Tribe has garlanded the interior of the 918 Bathurst Centre for Culture with colourful, earth-tones streamers that match the colour-scheme of the women’s outfits, as if to suggest that the holistic religion of obeah is more in harmony with nature than is the Puritan’s Christianity. Indeed, you only need to read the sermons of the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) or the descriptions of nature in Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) to know that Puritans regarded nature as evil and threatening to their well-being. C.J. Astronomo has achieved a remarkable number of effects from the small number of instruments available in the auditorium.
Tribe has constructed a large rectangular platform attached to the shallow proscenium stage at the back of the hall and given it a long ramp leading to it through the central aisle. The audience is seated on either side of the platform and the aisle so that we feel part of the action taking place in our midst. The fact that the show uses no microphones gives us the pleasure of hearing unmediated the beauty and power of the voices and their luscious close harmonies.
Obeah Opera is an unusually inventive work in itself and handily accomplishes its double task of redefining the character of Tituba and rehabilitating obeah itself as a valid, uplifting form of worship. Anyone planning to see Soulpepper’s production of The Crucible starting in July this year should seriously consider seeing Obeah Opera for an alternative point of view. Anyone interested in music theatre of any kind should hurry to see this innovative show packed with stunning solo and choral work that deserves the widest possible audience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Bemnet Tekleyohannes, Joni NehRita, Nicole Brooks, Macomere Fifi and Saidah Baba Talibah. ©2012 Nation Cheong.
For tickets, visit www.obeahopera.com.
2012-02-23
Obeah Opera