Harlem Shuffle

Playwright Djanet Sears. (Canadian Press)

Stratford’s Shakespearean festival is one of Canada’s oldest and most distinguished theatrical institutions. It’s also about as multicoloured as a loaf of Wonder Bread. That’s one reason why this season, amid the usual classics by the Bard and a bunch of other dead, white European and American males, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet sticks out like an African violet in a patch of daisies.

It’s a Stratford milestone — three, in fact. The show, which begins performances June 20, is the first black work to be produced in the festival’s 54-year history; the first to be directed by a black woman (Sears); and the first with an all-black cast. But for all that, could it also just be a case of — to use an ugly old word — tokenism?

“This is the beginning of something, hopefully,” says Sears at the end of a rehearsal day earlier this month, as she and actor Karen Robinson tuck into identical suppers of quiche and salad in the festival’s greenroom cafeteria. “I think it’s just the first of lots of plays [at Stratford] reflecting the diverse people who live in this country. I’m hoping this is part of a long-term vision and the sense I’m intuiting is that it is.”

Robinson seconds her. “I think there’s a commitment to broadening the scope of the stories that Stratford tells,” says the former Albertan, who spent two previous festival seasons doing Greek tragedies and the like. “The people I see spearheading it are [executive director] Antoni Cimolino and [head of new play development] Andrey Tarasiuk. It’s something they keep talking about, but the proof is in the pudding, and now we’re actually here.”

Tarasiuk confirms their suspicions, noting that the festival has recently commissioned new plays by another African-Canadian playwright, Andrew Moodie (Riot, about Toronto’s response to the Rodney King verdict) and First Nations writer Daniel David Moses. As for Harlem Duet, which was first produced by Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre in 1997, Tarasiuk says it’s been in Stratford’s sights for some time.

It doesn’t hurt that Sears also enjoyed a mainstream breakthrough with her last play, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, which was originally co-produced by the small Nightwood and Obsidian companies in 2002, then picked up by Mirvish Productions for a commercial run. While Harlem Duet has already won a shelf-full of prizes (including the Governor General’s Award for Sears) and been produced in Toronto, Halifax and New York, Stratford will give the play its biggest audience exposure to date. It’ll be on the boards of the 260-seat Studio Theatre until late September, competing for the more than half a million patrons who flock to the festival annually.

In return, the play could cause a shift in Stratford’s demographics. Nigel Shawn Williams, Robinson’s co-star in this production, believes it will attract more black people to the rural Ontario fete, which draws a large part of its audience from multicultural Toronto and about 30 per cent from nearby U.S. cities such as Detroit.

“There are thousands of people who would love to come to the Stratford Festival and see a play, but there’s no play to go and see,” Williams says. “I think this year there’s going to be thousands of new audience members, and they’re going to be of colour, because this is a play that’s telling a story that speaks to them — as opposed to Shakespeare’s Othello, which does not speak to a black audience.”

Harlem Duet is a kind of soul riff on that classic tragedy, in that Sears relocates Shakespeare’s flawed hero to modern-day New York and imagines the domestic events that lead to his downfall. In this update, Othello (Williams) is no longer a Moorish general but an African-American college professor who has just left Billie (Robinson), his black wife of nine years, for a white colleague named Mona. As it turns out, however, Othello and Billie still share a powerful bond; their bitter breakup finds them torn between their lingering erotic attraction and their sharply conflicting racial viewpoints. Their apartment overlooks the intersection of Harlem’s Malcolm X and Martin Luther King boulevards, representing, in Sears’s words, “the Afrocentric versus the integrationist” philosophies at the heart of African-American sociocultural debate.

The child of Jamaican and Guyanese parents, Sears says she’s been stewing over Othello ever since she was a kid growing up in England. At the age of 11, she saw a BBC telecast of Laurence Olivier’s famous film performance, in which the great actor played the title role in blackface. “While I wasn’t offended, it left a strange taste in my psyche,” remembers the 47-year-old Sears. Later, as an adult living in Toronto, she was struck by the way journalists and commentators would automatically refer to the Othello-Desdemona story in such controversial cases as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill sexual harassment hearings and the O.J. Simpson murder trial. “Othello has become a black archetype of mythic proportions,” says Sears.

In Harlem Duet, she makes Othello’s betrayal of Billie part of the myth, with flashbacks to the pre-Civil War and pre-Civil Rights eras, where we see their tragedy played out again and again, with minor variations. Sears suggests that her characters carry two centuries of African-American experience on their shoulders by scoring the work to a soundscape of speeches by King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Louis Farrakhan and other black leaders, accompanied by strains of blues, jazz and funk played by a bass-and-cello duo.

For her Stratford staging, Sears combines the cast of two previous productions of Harlem Duet. Williams and Barbara Barnes-Hopkins, as Billie’s lovelorn landlady Magi, revisit the roles they originated for Nightwood in ’97; Robinson and Walter Borden — who portrays Canada, Billie’s estranged father from Nova Scotia — were in the version seen at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre in 2000. Newcomer Sophia Walker rounds out the ensemble as Billie’s sister-in-law, Amah.

If those past productions are any indication, Stratford’s bars and cafés should brace themselves for a lot of post-show arguments over racial politics. “When we did it in Halifax,” says Robinson, “there were people who would come and see the play, then go home, haul their lawn chairs out and sit out front and talk about it till three o’clock in the morning.”

In Toronto, some audience members didn’t wait for the end of the performance to voice their opinions. “At one point, Nigel was afraid to go outside after the show,” recalls Sears with a laugh, “because there was a large group of black women out there who’d made a lot of noise in the theatre.”

“Actually, it was fun,” says Williams. “You knew they were involved, you were talking to them, it meant something to them.”

That said, race is only one part of the play, notes Sears. She ultimately hopes Stratford audiences will enjoy it regardless of their skin tone. “The [racial] stuff is good, it engages the intellect, but it’s also a good love story, sexy and racy. And,” she goes on to confide in a half-whisper, “this is the sexiest version I’ve ever done. It’s hot. It’s contentious.”

Just how torrid does it get?

“There’s a reason I’m eating salad,” says Robinson coyly.

“And I’ve stopped drinking beer,” adds Williams.

The three burst into laughter. Contrary to what the promotional photo suggests, Robinson and Williams won’t be nude, but they will appear in a state of semi-undress. “Yeah, sexy and racy,” says Sears. “That’s what I like.” After all, this University of Toronto professor is also a die-hard fan of Britain’s longest-running TV soap. “Yeah, this play is really just Coronation Street with black people in Harlem,” she sums up. “Well, OK, maybe not. But if you like Coronation Street, you’ll love Harlem Duet.”

Harlem Duet began previews June 20, opens June 29 and runs until Sept. 22 at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ontario.

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