Timely play documents racism across centuries
Harlem Duet (out of 4) Written and directed by Djanet Sears. Until Oct. 28 at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Avenue. TarragonTheatre.com or 416-531-1827
In Harlem Duet, the main character Sybil’s name is said to mean “Seer of the future.” And watching this play from 1997 unfold two decades later, with strikingly current arguments about race, sexism, appropriation and privilege, argues a certain prescience for its creator, the inestimable Djanet Sears.
But for a more accurate and sobering take on the way Harlem Duet’s heartbreaking exploration of Black trauma — of Black women and artists in particular — still electrifies today, don’t cast Sears as a fortune-teller, but as a documentarian. Similar arguments repeat throughout generations, in the same way that Harlem Duet brings the relationship between Othello and his wife Billie from 2000 Harlem to the vaudeville industry in the 1920s, and to a Southern plantation in the 1860s. As Billie says to open the play, portrayed in the current, vital production by the powerful Virgilia Griffith, “We’ve done this before.”
In her “prequel” to Shakespeare’s Othello, what she calls a “rhapsodic blues tragedy,” Sears transforms the canonical character into an academic in New York, who leaves his partner of nine years Sybil, or Billie, for a white colleague, Mona. A grad student studying the mental health of Black people, Billie reels from a multitude of betrayals: the loss of her Othello (Beau Dixon) is wrenching enough (in addition to an analysis of race, Sears’s play is also simply a tragic story of heartbreak), but it symbolizes the deep-rooted, racist power imbalances that persist in society and demand Black men and women to play into their own oppression.
In Harlem Duet, Othello mansplaining affirmative action to Billie (“Injustice against Blacks won’t be solved by injustice against whites, you know that”) is a parallel to a Black actor donning blackface to play Othello in the 1920s and a slave choosing to remain loyal to his master instead of taking the risk to es- cape. Sears draws these connections with the scope and ambition of the author of its inspiration, and the return of Harlem Duet comes when audiences are thirsty for responses to the world’s reigning playwright.
After all, Lyric Hammersmith’s mash-up othellomacbeth recently opened in London, as did Bedlam’s Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet in New York City. Toronto saw its own Shakespeare intervention this summer with Shakespeare in the Ruff’s Portia’s Julius Caesar.
As it first did in 1997 (as well as in 2006, when it became the first play at the Stratford Festival to be written by a Black woman, directed by a Black woman or to feature an allBlack cast), Harlem Duet offers an empathetic rationale behind what Sears says is the “most famous Black character in all of theatre” but does not let him off the hook. In this production, directed by Sears to open Tarragon Theatre’s 2018-19 season, Dixon’s stature overwhelms Griffith physically, like his indoctrination into the world of academia leaves no room for her arguments in his world view — he’s stubborn, oblivious, insensitive and wrong, but he is also the vessel for arguments that are still touted by people who “don’t see race” or rely on platitudes such as “we’re all the same.” He is based off a white man’s version of a Black man in 1603, but still fits into today.
But Billie, embodied by Griffith, is still a woman rarely seen on stage today. Not only fiercely intelligent, maternal, professionally ambitious and funny, but, above all else, rageful. Griffith handles Billie’s screeds against Othello and society — the moments in which Sears is most poetic — with almost violent attention. It’s well-comple- mented by supporting performances from the delightful Ordena Stephens-Thompson as her landlord, Magi, Tiffany Martin as her sister-in-law, Amah, and Walter Borden as her father, Canada (a very problematic source of comfort, and not accidentally named), characters who bring humour and joy as Billie loses her mind and everything else — literally, as Astrid Janson’s modern, naturalistic apartment setting, accented by cotton plants, is taken apart throughout the play, ending in empty space.
“We’re all mad, we just appear to be functional,” Billie tells Othello. In a cultural moment when that madness is being revealed, be thankful that Sears began to tell us why in 1997, and that there’s another chance to listen now.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga
Griffith handles Billie’s screeds against Othello and society … with almost violent attention