Stage Door Review

The Noose

Sunday, October 27, 2024

✭✭

by Frankétienne, translated by Dr. Asselin Charles, directed by Abigail Whitney

Abigail Whitney Productions, Next Stage Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

October 17-26, 2024;

undercurrents festival, Arts Court Theatre, Ottawa

February 5-15, 2025

Polydor: “Freedom is madness”

This year’s Next Stage Festival offers Torontonians the rare chance to see a play by Haiti’s greatest living author – Frankétienne (the nom de plume of Franck Étienne, born 1936). Abigail Whitney Productions is presenting the English-language Canadian premiere of Frankétienne’s most famous play, The Noose (Pèlen-tèt in the original Haitian creole), considered as one of the classics of Haitian theatre. The Noose was a sensation when it premiered in Port-au-Prince in 1978 until it was shut down by the Duvalier government. In 2000 the play was performed in Montreal starring Frankétienne himself.

The Noose focusses on the lives of two Haitian immigrants living in a grubby basement apartment in New York City in 1978. One, Polydor, is a middle-class intellectual and political refugee. The other, Pyram, is a lower-class labourer. For the sake of saving money, the two have been sharing the apartment for three years. While Pyram is away working, Polydor apparently does nothing but read books on political theory. His source of funds remains a mystery.

The play begins simply enough with Pyram returning home and telling Polydor what happened that day. Pyram says that he went to the train station and met a classy woman who was so taken with him that they found a washroom and had sex there. Polydor listens and then exposes every element of Pyram’s story as a lie. Frankétienne, thus, initially introduces Pyram as a fantasist and Polydor as a realist.

The action progresses in this fashion with every thought or deed of Pyram’s being undercut by Polydor’s exposure of Pyram’s ignorance or wishful thinking. The thought that keeps Pyram going while he performs his twelve hours of underpaid manual labour is the dream that he will save enough money to return to Haiti as a rich man and shower wealth on his children and the four women who bore them.

This dream, so fundamental to Pyram’s sense of purpose, Polydor cruelly tears apart and tells Pyram that Pyram is no better than a slave and is paid so little he will never save enough to be rich, let alone return to Haiti to see his family again. Pyram feels such despair he is ready to hang himself, hence the title, at which point Polydor realizes he has gone too far and tries to give Pyram some reason for living.

We initially see Pyram as the fantasist and Polydor as the realist, but the more Polydor speaks of how ideas are more important than food or clothing, the more we begin to wonder which of the two is really more in touch with reality. Polydor never leaves the apartment, does not work and has no one back in Haiti who depends on him, whereas Pyram goes out every day to work and sends the money he makes to Haiti to help support the 20 people – women, children, parents – who depend on him.

Though The Noose is considered a classic of Haitian theatre, it is well known that the play is an adaptation of the 1974 play The Émigrés (Emigranci in the original) by Polish playwright Sławomir Mrożek (1930-2013), translated into French in 1975. After seeing The Noose, it is surprising to realize how many elements that make the play distinctive are already present in Mrożek’s play. Both plays concern two men in a basement apartment – one and intellectual, one a worker – who have left their homeland to work in a foreign country. More than this are the host of details the two plays have in common. This includes the worker’s tale of meeting a woman at the trains station, his longing to see the flies back home, the can of dog food, the doll under his pillow, the dream of returning home rich, the fact of his hands shaking, his attempt at hanging himself and the intellectual’s comparison of the apartment to being inside someone’s stomach.

Given how much of Mrożek is in The Noose, it is remarkable how Frankétienne has transformed it into a Haitian play. The first thing Frankétienne does is to get rid of Mrożek’s abstractness. Frankétienne’s play does not take place in an unknown country at an unknown time, but in New York City during the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haitian dictator François Duvalier, who continued his father’s suppression of free speech and who presided over his country’s descent into the most widespread poverty in the Western Hemisphere. This fact provides very real political and financial reasons why Frankétienne’s two protagonists should leave their country for a land of hope.

Mrożek names his intellectual “AA” and his worker “XX”. Frankétienne gives his characters names with more resonance. “AA” he renames Polydor and “XX” is Pyram. Both are Haitian creole versions of names from Greek legend. Polydor was a Trojan prince killed by Achilles during the Trojan War. Pyramus was the Babylonian lover who killed himself when he thought his beloved had been killed. By connecting his two Haitian characters to Greek myth, Frankétienne highlights the characters’ nobility, but, since neither dies, he shows that they need not follow their namesakes’ fates.

Most important, Frankétienne gives his adaptation a significantly different ending than Mrożek’s play. In Mrożek, the two men get drunk and end up reminiscing about the homeland they may never see again. In Frankétienne, the two are completely sober and when Pyram becomes nostalgic for home, Polydor tells him how useless such feelings are. Instead, of falling into some kind of besotted revery, Frankétienne has Polydor help Pyram write a letter home to tell people what it is really like as a Black immigrant in the USA. It is not the Land of Milk and Honey that Haitians think it. Polydor wants to urge his countrymen to stay home and fight to make Haiti a more equitable nation.

Director Abigail Whitney fully understands the ebb and flow of the action and how it gradually builds toward this powerful climax. She has also drawn wonderfully engaging performances from the play’s two actors. She helps to make it quite believable that two such different people could have roomed together for three years. In fact, the two work so well together they give us the impression that Pyram and Polydor have had the same discussion we see several times before.

Haitian-born Louco St. Fleur is a delight. He reveals an innocence that underlies Pyram’s braggadocio and native smarts that counter Polydor’s constant criticism. All his outward toughness and good humour help disguise his fear and vulnerability. That is why it is so disturbing see such a vital young man as St. Fleur’s Pyram eventually succumb to despair.

In contrast to the loveable devil-may-care attitude St. Fleur gives Pyram is the unyieldingly intense attitude Edmond Clark gives Polydor. Clarke portrays Polydor as a man who seems to be burning up with rage. Polydor’s only outlet is his carping at Pyram, but luckily even Polydor realizes when he has gone too far.

Dr. Asselin Charles’s translation heavily seasons Pyram’s English with French phrases to create the impression of Haitian creole and St. Fleur give his phrases a Caribbean lilt. Polydor speaks in polysyllables which Clark pronounces with absolute clarity, even through often clenched teeth.

At a time when the Republican candidate for president is spreading grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants, it is even more vital for people to see a play like The Noose to garner some insight into Haitian immigrants as individuals and to see that immigration to the US is not an idle decision but often a painful necessity. Frankétienne is an extraordinary writer and painter who has remained in Haiti despite all its political and natural disasters. Because of his steadfastness in standing by his fellow Haitians and drawing world attention to their needs, in 2010 he was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace. Seeing his best-known play in such a fine production is a gift to any theatre-lover. If you happen to miss the performances in Toronto, the production is travelling to the undercurrent festival in Ottawa in 2025 and then to New York. Be sure to see it.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Edmond Clark as Polydor and Louco St. Fleur as Pyram. © 2024 Shih Liu.

For tickets visit: fringetoronto.com or ottawafringe.com.