Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✩✩
by Ngozi Paul, directed by Zach Russell
Emancipation Arts with Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave., Toronto
March 30-April 8, 2017
“I've been a fool before;
Wouldn't like to get my love caught in the slammin’ door.
How about some information, please?”
(Paula Abdul, Straight Up, 1988)
Ngozi Paul won the Spotlight Award for Best Performance of the 2015 SummerWorks Festival for her solo show The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely. It is easy to why. Paul, always a vibrant presence on stage, plays almost twenty different characters besides convincingly taking us through the life of Ms Lovely from childhood to early adulthood. The play itself, however, is problematic.
The play begins as choreographer Roger Jeffrey has Paul dance and twerk her way onto the stage through the audience. Then Paul plays one half of a couple having sex. It becomes clear that Lovely is having sex with a married man and that her relationship with the man must be kept secret “to the grave”. Lovely escapes to the bathroom to freshen up. There, seeing multiple reflections of herself, she has a series of flashbacks of how her search for “emancipated love” has somehow led to this dead end.
What follows, however, is a series of unenlightened and unenlightening sexual encounters with a wide range of men. Paul shows us Lovely trying to attract male attention by imitating the “successful” girls at school, taking a friend’s bad advice about how to get guys to go down on her and making one bad choice after another of sexual partners. Paul merely has Lovely narrate all their encounters but never has her reflect on what they mean or ask herself why she is always ending up in unfulfilling relationships.
Interrupting the flow of Lovely’s narrative are episodes where Paul stands in a sci-fi-like cone of light created by lighting designer Kaleigh Krysztofiak. Here Paul speaks in a calm, articulate manner quite unlike the semi-articulate versions of Lovely as a child and a teenager. She speaks of a black woman taken from Africa and put on show in England as a freak where people were allowed to touch and prod her as if she were not even human. She also speaks of being dissected, her organs being washed and preserved and a cast made of her body.
I have always maintained that a play should be self-explanatory, that we should not need to read outside information like notes in a programme in order to understand what a happens in a play. Yet in Ms. Lovely the only way to understand what the scenes about the woman from Africa are about is by reading the programme.
There we discover that the woman is Sara Baartman, “who has become an icon for black female objectification and hyper sexualization in the late 19th century”. Baartman’s story is horrific. She was a member of the Khoi people and was taken to England in 1810 by her black employer and an white English doctor who sought to make money my exhibiting as a curiosity of nature. Called the “Hottentot Venus” she was shown on stage in London for four years. In 1814 she was sold to a French animal trainer who also exhibited her. A French scientist saw in Baartman a missing link between humans and animals and after her death in 1815, he dissected her body with her brains, skeleton and genitalia on display in a museum until 2002 when her remains were returned to South Africa.
Paul has the ghost of Baartman narrate these events but in far too vague a way. While the Khoi tribe is mentioned, neither Sara’s name nor the term “Hottentot Venus” never are. Thus, unless we are already familiar with Baartman’s story, most people will never guess whose ghost it is that Paul is presenting.
The second problem is that these appearances of Baartman’s ghost are completely unrelated to Lovely’s story. How is the story of Lovely, who as far as Paul depicts it, looks for love by willingly choosing men for sex, anything like Baartman would had no control over her destiny and was put on display as a sex object? In Lovely’s story Lovely is in control of the various sexual situations she gets into and much of the comedy of the play consists of her comments about how well or more often how poorly the men are performing the sex act. Dramatically, the Baartman episodes are not integrated into the action of the play. Baartman speaks as herself and Paul gives us no clue that Lovely has ever even heard of Baartman’s story. Yet, somehow, at the end of Lovely’s survey of her life in the washroom, she mysteriously emerges “emancipated”.
As it is Ms. Lovely seems to be primarily a comic look at a typical teenager’s successes and failures in sexual experimentation. Paul could easily have made Baartman’s story central to Lovely’s awakening simply by showing how Lovely came to know about Baartman’s story and how that story affected her.
Despite this, Ms. Lovely is a showcase for Paul’s wide-ranging talent. Through the slightest changes in voice and movement she conjures up almost 20 different characters. Some of the best of these are the various men in Lovely’s life who are mostly too wimpy or too egocentric. Paul is great at impersonating the fire-and-brimstone preacher at her church, but perhaps her most memorable character is that of her grandmother who still has a strong Jamaican accent and is disturbed by what she sees as Lovely’s slipping away from the straight and narrow path of morality.
The action is accompanied by soulful live music by Waleed Abdulhamid and a sampling of pop songs, sound effects and atmospheric music by DJ L’Oqenz. If the production were more analytical, the two performers would be given distinct roles to play – the live music underscoring only certain aspects of Lovely’s life, while L’Oqenz’s samples would cover another – but such a division did not seem to exist.
Not having seen the production of 2015, I can’t say whether Zach Russell’s direction is an improvement on the original direction or not. Russell does make certain that Paul uses every part of Judith Bowden’s small stage depicting a hotel-like bathroom as well as the area off the set among the audience.
To make Ms. Lovely more than just a series of episodes with sex as their subject interrupted by meditations of the ghost of Baartman, Paul really needs the help of a dramaturge who can look at the play from the outside and see what an audience unfamiliar with either Lovely’s or Baartman’s story will see including the peculiar disconnect between the two stories. The sheer vitality of Paul's performance carries the play along. But, until Paul revises her script, audiences will likely leave without knowing how exactly the engaging Ms Lovely achieved her emancipation.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Ngozi Paul, ©2015 Setti Kidane; Ngozi Paul, ©2017 Setti Kidane.
For tickets, visit http://crowstheatre.com.
2017-04-04
The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely