Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✩✩
by Saga Collectif, directed by Jonathan Seinen
Saga Collectif & Buddies Bad Times Theatre, Buddies Bad Times Theatre, Toronto
February 28-March 11, 2018
“This is going to be a spiritual experience tonight”
Black Boys premiered to great acclaim in Toronto in 2016 and has since toured to Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal. Now it returns to Toronto for a two-week run. Black Boys is a performance piece intended to explore and celebrate what it is to be Black, male and queer, a minority within a minority. It combines dialogue, monologue, song and dance to present a view of the issue that is far more complex than an ordinary non-Black viewer might have thought. For that very reason anyone who did not have the chance to see this show before should make a point of seeing it now.
Nevertheless, while it is important that such a show with such a goal exists at all, we have to ask whether the show actually achieves what it sets out to do. What we see is that while the show tells us a lot about what it like to be a Black male in Canada, it says very little about what it is to be queer in Canada and even less about what it is like to be a Black queer male.
As a result Black Boys seems far too content to deal in generalities. If you entered the show to gain some insight into the queer Black male experience, you may find that you exit with a large number of essential questions left unanswered. There is no doubt that the three performers Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Tawiah Ben-Eben M’Carthy and Thomas Olajide are immensely talented, but there is also no doubt that with the right guidance the three could have created a more focussed show that looks more deeply into its specific subject.
The show’s greatest achievement is in demonstrating that being Black, queer and male still leaves room for wide diversity. This point is especially important for any younger people seeing the show and still sorting out their identity to realize that is no one way for a Black queer male to be.
The longest single scene in the show tackles this notion head on. In it M’Carthy and Olajide watch Jackman-Torkoff perform a tribute to famed Black performer Josephine Baker (1906-75) in the 1927 revue Un Vent de folie at the Folies Bergère in Paris. It was in that revue that she worn her iconic costume that consisted only of a string of bananas around her waist. Jackman-Torkoff dresses the same (with briefs underneath) and performs Jazz Age-inspired choreography by Virgilia Griffith that culminates in his singing “Amazing Grace” while lying on the floor.
This show-within-a-show outrages both M’Carthy and Olajide but for different reasons. Ghanian-born M’Carthy cannot understand why Jackman-Torkoff would want to perpetuate the exoticizing of the black body by imitating Baker’s skirt of bananas. Olajide cannot understand how Jackman-Torkoff can sing a song like “Amazing Grace” which was written in 1773 by a White former slave-trader turned Anglican clergyman. For Olajide the fact that “Amazing Grace” would become perhaps the best-known African-American spiritual means nothing compared to the background of its author.
To this M’Carthy responds that as a practicing Christian, the spiritual has an entirely different meaning for him and he does not want Olajide to force his interpretation of it on him. This dispute leads the three into a general argument about identity.
Because of this difference of background, M’Carthy reveals the strange fact that some Blacks whose families have long lived in Canada do not consider recent immigrants from Africa as “Black”. With Jackman-Torkoff, who is of a mixed race background, Olajide insultingly asks him if he thinks of himself as Black or White, thus bringing up the seldom-discussed issue of colourism within the Black community where lighter coloured individuals are favoured over darker coloured ones. Jackman-Torkoff retorts that Olajide is one of those gays who is proud to be “straight-looking, straight-acting”, phrases often criticized within the gay community as a type of internalized homophobia.
All three agree that the Black Lives Matter protest that halted the Toronto Gay Pride Parade in 2016 was a good thing, though no one mentions whether excluding a group like the police, which includes Black gay officers, from future parades is also a good thing. Olajide points out that the protest made people aware that the gay community is not free of racism. He points to the de facto separation in certain downtown clubs into Black and White areas as evidence and to the lack of diversity of people portrayed on posters about gay causes.
This is the hardest hitting section of the show. Unfortunately, after having pointed out the divisions within the gay community and within the Black community, we wait in vain for any specific comments on the Black gay community. Surprisingly, what the show neglects to cover at all are issues that gay Blacks encounter in forming relationships. The phrase “black on black love” is repeated several times in the show, but never is explored. Where do our three Black queer performers look for relationships? Is it only within the Black queer community? If it is also outside it, what kind of advantages or difficulties do they encounter?
What makes the lack of this discussion so mystifying is that all three performers discussed exactly these types of questions in a promo interview for the show in Xtra in November 2016*. The answers all three give are fascinating and point to issues such as the fetishization of the black body that many non-Black gay people may be unaware of. Why is it that the very circumstances where being both Black and queer come together are excluded from the show?
This baffling omission aside, the show suffers from a lack of balance. Olajide performs a funny skit to show how he realized he was gay. He tries to masturbate to naked female photos in a magazine only to keep thinking of a guy and finds that only thinking of that guy will work. This makes us wonder what the experience was like for the other two performers. And, for all three, we wonder what the consequences were of realizing they were gay and then of coming out. For instance, is coming out more difficult for a Black male than it is for a White male? These three brave performers would know and they could tell us if the script allowed it.
Jackman-Torkoff has a dynamic skit in which he tells us his greatest fear and how he keeps it at bay. Again, we wonder what the greatest fear of the other two performers is and how they have dealt with it. What we particularly would like to know is what fears being a minority within a minority brings with it and how these three performers have conquered them. Sadly, the show again evades significant questions such as this.
The highlight of the show are the dance sequences choreographed by Virgilia Griffith. Often in these sequences we receive a greater impression of the tensions and complexities of being Black and queer than we do in the spoken sections. She gives all three the gesture of a fist rising from the stomach up through the throat and out of the mouth where it bursts open and both arms react in a wild frenzy. This seems to parallel both the individual’s release in finally telling the truth about himself and the group’s release in finally telling an audience in general about their experiences. Much of Griffith’s choreography also involves the performers pushing each other yet catching each other before they fall, moves seeming to represent the tensions that exist among the individuals but also the need to protect any one of them from harm.
While Black Boys has already found success in its present form in Toronto and elsewhere, I would like to think of this production as a first draft of a better, more incisive show that cleaves more closely to its stated topic of examining what it is to be a queer, Black male. This revision would have to include the process of how each performer came out, their struggle for acceptance within their community and how they each negotiate the dynamics of the relationships they experience.
The show as it is breaks down any notion of queer Black males as a uniform entity. Knowing more about the essential turning points in gay lives from their perspective would not only help a non-Black audience to a greater understanding but help let queer Black youth see that people like these brave, warm-hearted performers have been through these trying experiences and emerged powerful and proud.
* https://www.dailyxtra.com/battling-stereotypes-and-finding-love-as-a-queer-black-man-72441
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Thomas Olajide and Tawiah Ben-Eben M’Carthy; Thomas Olajide; Tawiah Ben-Eben M’Carthy, Thomas Olajide and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff. ©2018 Jeremy Mimnagh.
For tickets, visit http://buddiesinbadtimes.com.
2018-03-02
Black Boys