✭✭✭✭✭

written and directed by Djanet Sears

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

September 26-October 28, 2018

Othello: “I am not my skin”

It is always satisfying when a play acclaimed as a masterpiece more than twenty years ago proves to be even more powerful when revived today.  Such is the case with Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears.  I did not see the original production in Toronto in 1997, but I did see the revival of the play at the Stratford Festival in 2006 directed then as now by the author herself.  In 2006 the play seemed primarily to be a series of riffs on themes about Black people living in White society as suggested by Shakespeare’s Othello.  While that is still true the current worsening of Black-White relations in North America and elsewhere has made the play into an inquiry into whether bridging the divisions between the races is possible or even desirable.  Fiercely committed performances from the entire cast make this must-see theatre even for those unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play.

While the current production of the play at the Tarragon Theatre is new, the play itself has not changed.  I find that many though not all of my remarks about the play in 2006 are still valid.  In summarizing the action, I wrote that the play “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”.

In 2006 I noted Sears’s use of flashbacks to three different eras.  One era is in the late 20th century and shows us the early, happier years of Othello and Billie’s marriage.  The second era is the Harlem Renaissance in 1928 and the Frankie-and-Johnny relationship of ‘She’ and ‘He’, where He is a classically trained actor who is about to put on blackface to appear in a minstrel show.  The third era is in the American South in 1860 where the two lovers are slaves.  ‘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.

What was not as clear to me in 2006 but is abundantly clear in the present production is that the periods in 1928 and 1860 are versions of the Billie-Othello story as they might occur in those periods.  As a result Sears’s play presents us with three versions of the story and three different endings. 

 

“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”.

Seeing the play in 2018 and hearing Sears’s emphasis on forgiveness, we can only think how much humanity we have lost since 1997 and how we have come to live in a culture of revenge.  We, like Billie’s landlady Magi (Ordena Stephens-Thompson), can only look on Billie’s plan to present Othello with a poisoned handkerchief as a sign of Billie’s delusion.  As Magi says, “If that stuff really worked do you think African people would be where they are now?”   

 

Unlike the 2006 production, the Tarragon production has no weak link in the cast.  Virgilia Griffith gives an extraordinarily intense performance as Billie, She and Her.  As the depressed Billie her negativity and self-absorption seems to suck the air out of whatever room she enters.  She captures the helplessness and hopelessness of depression all too well along with its attendant emotional lability allowing her to argue clearly about racial politics one moment and lapse into rage or debility at the next.  Griffiths is so convincing as Billie that it is a surprise to see her as the optimistic Her and the scornful She.

Beau Dixon is a fine Othello.  His characters of Him and He are much more similar that are Griffith’s widely different characters, but Sears’s notion is that each of the three characters Dixon plays allows him little desire not to conform to the society around them.  In fact, Othello is the one who most actively wishes to be part of it.  Much as the opening night audience through its rumblings wanted to regard Othello as a villain, Sears’s play is not so simplistic.  Sears even suggests that Billie’s possessiveness may have been one of the factors that led Othello to seek escape from the relationship.  Sears as author and director allows Dixon to garner sympathy for Othello and shows that it is genuinely difficult for Othello to let go of the love he once had for Billie.  In contrast, Dixon makes the lack of rebellion of Him and He appear a betrayal of Her in the first case and a horrible self-betrayal in the second.

Sears provides two counterexamples to Billie and Othello’s domestic strife of in the characters of Magi and her sister-in-law Amah.  The character Magi functions as the classic example of comic relief.  There is no equivalent in Shakespeare’s Othello, but Magi is similar in temperament to the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.  In contrast to Billie’s negative view of men, Magi, who is reaching middle age, is very anxious to find a man and get pregnant, the sooner the better, because she hears her biological clock ticking.  She becomes increasingly less picky about what kind of man will do.  Ordena Stephens-Thompson is hilarious in the role.  Her perfect comic timing and her wry delivery make her every entrance a welcome respite from the gloom surrounding Billie. 

Tiffany Martin’s Amah is the other contrasting character.  Amah is happily married to Billie’s brother and has a child whom both Magi and Billie adore.  Martin shows us a young woman who is content with her life and because of that finds Billie’s depression difficult to understand.  Amah feels that Billie is making herself ill by holding on so tightly to her anger against Othello.  She carries on the wisdom of Billie’s and her mother that if you carry a grievance around with you too long it sets up house inside of you.  Martin shows how sincerely Amah tries to persuade Billie to forgive telling her that forgiveness is a virtue.  Billie counters that patience is a virtue, but it is hard to believe that Billie’s suffering constitutes what is meant by patience.

A fifth character is also a bearer of positivity though Billie finds it difficult to accept.  This is her father Canada played by Walter Borden, who also played the role in 2006.  Billie grew up hating her father because he was an abusive alcoholic.  But now he has changed, given up drink and seeks reconciliation with Billie.  Billie finds this almost impossible to do although Magi tells her that Canada is nothing like the perpetually angry man that Billie had described.  Borden is a sympathetic presence as the father, a man all too aware of his past failings and the anger it will provoke in his daughter while remaining hopeful that she can forgive him and return to the safe haven that his name symbolically represents.

Sears thus presents the battle between Othello and Billie in all its complexity.  Othello may represent an assimilationist point of view, but we can’t disregard the truth of his statement, “I am more than my skin”.  Billie may be a Black separatist and it’s hard to disagree with her questioning why the White worldview should be the one Blacks should aspire to.  Yet, Sears demonstrates through Magi, Amah and Canada that Billie’s inability to forgive is contributing to her misery. 

Unlike her design for the play in 2006, Astrid Janson no longer tries to represent all three time periods on stage at once.  The props for 1928 are set out as needed and taken away.  Jansen has instead imagined the stage as a wall-less view of Othello and Billie’s apartment.  A large crack running downstage to upstage is filled with cotton shrubs and represents the 1860s world of slavery where Him and Her converse.  This is a brilliant idea since it suggests that the modern America of Othello and Billie is still riven by the wound of slavery in the past.  Also, since it separates Billie and Othello’s bed from the rest of the apartment, it visually embodies the split in their relationship. 

As in the 2006 production the action has interludes and underscoring by live musicians on cello (Cymphoni Fantastique) and double bass (Bryant Didier).  The music in modes from ragtime to jazz to avant-garde to classical not only reinforces the changing moods of the scenes but represents in itself that harmony between two people is possible.

If you happen not to have seen Harlem Duet in 2006, now is the time to do so.  This is one of the authentically great Canadian plays and the present production not only is superior to the previous one but current events have made the issues it examines more relevant than ever.                                              

    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Virgilia Griffith as Billie and Beau Dixon as Othello; Beau Dixon as Him and Virgilia Griffith as Her; Ordena Stephens-Thompson as Magi and Walter Borden as Canada. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit http://www.tarragontheatre.com