Stage Door Review

Beyonsea and the Mothers

Friday, January 31, 2025

✭✭

written and directed by Teneile Warren

Green Light Arts, Conrad Centre, Kitchener

January 30-February 9, 2025

Beyonsea: “Children understand things, too”

Green Light Arts, a small professional theatre company in Kitchener, is presenting the world premiere of Beyonsea and the Mothers, a new play by Kitchener-based playwright Teneile Warren. Beyonsea is a wonderfully warm, big-hearted play about self-understanding and learning how to make home in a new place. Beautifully written and directed and acted by an ideal cast, Beyonsea deserves the largest possible audience.

The title character of Beyonsea (pronounced just like Beyoncé the singer) is a 12-year-old girl who arrives in Canada from Jamaica to live with her mother Simone. The problem is that Simone left Jamaica when Beyonsea was only two leaving Simone’s mother to raise her daughter. Beyonsea thus is forced to leave a mother she knows and loves (i.e., her grandmother) for Simone, whom she neither knows nor loves. Simone, who works long hours, tells Beyonsea never to leave the house, but Beyonsea does visit the backyard where she meets Michael, who owns the house and lives in a basement apartment. But there is a problem here, too, since Simone tells Beyonsea never to speak to Michael, a homosexual and drag artist, since she views him as a “reprobate”.

Beyonsea’s situation raises a host of questions. Why did Beyonsea’s mother leave her when she was two? Why has Beyonsea been sent to Canada when she was so happy in Jamaica? Why does Simone hate her own mother? Why does Beyonsea get along so much better with Michael than Simone?

The action of the play follows the gradual evolution of Beyonsea’s situation until all three characters come to respect and understand each other. Simone believes that “There are truths that should not be told” and Michael wants to say nothing about his past and his own mother. Yet, these truths eventually must be told.

What makes Warren’s play a constant delight is how believable and well-drawn the characters are, how natural and easily flowing the dialogue is and how subtly the characters’ views of each other begin to change. Seeing the play is such a positive experience because of the compassion that Warren shows all three of the characters. While the majority of the play is written in a naturalistic style, Warren begins the play with song and dance and both punctuate the action at various times. Warren allows characters to directly address the audience to explain themselves and includes periodic flashbacks to Beyonsea’s life in Jamaica, where the actor playing Michael and Simone play Beyonsea’s classmates.

Under Warren’s insightful direction the cast gives deeply committed performances. Chelsea Russell’s performance as Beyonsea is particularly cherishable. Russell perfectly captures how an inquisitive, intelligent young girl would react and speak. She makes us feel Beyonsea’s frustration when adults claim she will not understand certain parts of their lives. We feel her joy when she is able to transform a sad plot of land in the backyard into a riot of colour. Russell’s imitations of Beyonsea’s younger self at school in Jamaica giving a lecture on the importance of soil or reciting the “Jamaican Alphabet” by Louise Bennett are major pleasures because Russell so well projects Beyonsea’s mixture of innocence, earnestness and enthusiasm. Russell makes Beyonsea’s first interaction with Michael when in drag the most humorous sequence in the show as Beyonsea learns to treat Michael’s female alter ego Melody as a person completely separate from Michael.

Albert Williams has a perfect sense of comic timing in both of his personas as Michael and Melody. He adds just enough effeminate mannerisms to Michael that it is logical Beyonsea should wonder what kind of person he is. He also adds enough masculine behaviour to Melody that it similarly logical that Beyonsea should be confused by her. What shines through in Williams’s performance in both personas is a strong empathy for Beyonsea and her unhappiness. Michael is a person who knows unhappiness, coming as he does from a country where homosexual activity is still criminalized. Just as strong as Michael’s empathy is the resilience he embodies that surreptitiously inspires both Beyonsea and Simone. Williams makes both Michael and Melody congenial figures who light up the stage whenever they appear.

Emerjade Simms well plays Simone as a young woman, only 14 years older than Beyonsea, who is burdened with a complex mix of anger, fear, sadness and guilt. Simms lets us know that Simone is happy at some deep level to have her child back with her again even if Simone struggles to discover how act in a motherly fashion towards her. Simms shows that Simone knows she must conquer the demons that plague her if she is to keep Beyonsea and fears that she may not have the strength to do so. It is to Simms’s credit that we root for Simone throughout no matter what mistakes she makes along the way.

Jung A Im has created a fine set that makes us feel as if we are peering through the walls of the house where the three characters live to observe their behaviour. Im’s impressive transformation of the desolate garden of Michael’s to the lush garden of Beyonsea’s stands as an prime symbol of the transformation that the lives of all three characters will undergo. All of this is enhanced by Chris Malkowski’s lighting which is key in indicating not only times of day but personal reflections and brief glimpses of the past.

In times like the present, it is a joy to experience a play that gives us well-rounded, complex human beings instead of caricatures and fully believes that people have the power to transform their lives for the better. Warren loves their characters so much that they sometimes converse a bit longer than they need to, and the long first act could be condensed somewhat to balance better the short second act. Warren wants to have the show end as it began with song and dance, but, in fact, having Michael enter with three cups of tea on his tray is really an ideal and more succinct ending. Everybody who loves theatre should head over to the Conrad Centre to see this lovely play so brimming over with positive emotion. I hope that after its run in Kitchener, Warren’s play goes on to lift up the spirits of even more people elsewhere.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Albert Williams as Michael, Chelsea Russell as Beyonsea and Emerjade Simms as Simone; Chelsea Russell as Beyonsea and Emerjade Simms as Simone; Albert Williams as Michael. © 2025 Conan Stark.

For tickets visit: www.greenlight-arts.com.