Playing the Race Bard

riffs on shakespeare: harlem duet
the stratford festival
the national post

Shakespeare's black Othello married a white woman, and his play has much to say on how her white friends felt about it. It tells us nothing about the reactions of his black friends; it doesn't even tell us if he had any. Djanet Sears' Harlem Duet is a response to that, a recasting of the Othello situation in which the Moor has become a black New York academic. His Desdemona is now simply Mona, an unseen, though not unheard, white colleague. Very much seen and heard is Billie, Othello's former partner, driven to frenzy by his desertion. Most of the play happens in the Harlem apartment that Othello and Billie used to share, and where she now lives alone.

The time is the present, mostly. There is the occasional, very effective, flashback within the main action. There are also brief fragments of a couple of parallel stories, set in the past, and performed by the same actors who play Othello and Billie. These also take place in Harlem, and both similarly show a black man leaving a black woman for a white. One is set at the time of the Civil War, with the black couple initially wondering whether to light out for the fabled freedom of Canada; the other takes us to the 1920s, where a black actor with classical ambitions but condemned to appear in demeaning racial sketches (he actually has to put on blackface) incurs the murderous wrath of his about-to-be-ex.

Sears' play, much feted in Toronto in 1997, earns its Stratford revival, directed by the author, on grounds both textual (it's superbly written) and contextual (Shakespeare and all that jazz, the jazz being nearly as important as the Shakespeare). It does not, though, sit very happily in the festival's Studio, a small but steep auditorium with a thrust stage inhospitable to domestic drama, which this essentially is, and to the kind of buttoned-down acting it naturally summons forth. Some of the performances are lacking, and one of the crucial images—the stripping-down of a home—doesn't count for much in a setting that never looked lived-in in the first place. The historical scenes aren't well placed, physically or emotionally. They're fairly confusing, even in the text. They do set off some internal sparks, some of which illuminate the main story, but not enough to justify the distraction. A tale isn't necessarily richer for being told three times, especially when it's an explicit variation on one that already exists.

Harlem Duet does more than supply a new context for the Othello story. It also spins out variations on the play's existing elements. Some of these are just facile nudges; this Othello has his Iago, an offstage white colleague who presumably had something to do with tempting him. Others cut deep; if Shakespeare's Othello might be seen as an outsize representation of a black man "trying to pass," then that is certainly how Billie comes to regard her Othello; the more he seems to reject his heritage, the more she embraces hers. And then there's the matter of the handkerchief, the strawberry-spotted one that Othello's mother passed on to him, with "magic in the web"—a phrase that Sears manages, without any incongruity, to incorporate into her own dialogue. Her Othello gives it in turn to each of his women. Shakespeare tells us that "a sybil in her prophetic fury sewed the work"; Billie's given name, we learn, is Sybil, and in her fury, prophetic or otherwise, she soaks the napkin in old poisons, carefully researched ("Billie," says a marvellously skeptical friend, "if this kind of stuff truly worked, Africans wouldn't be in the situation we're in now.") and gives it to her Othello and his new bride. The old Othello was the agent of revenge; this one is its victim. Billie, meanwhile, seems the reincarnation of an even older tragic protagonist, though one of whom the play makes no explicit mention; in her passion, in her vengeance, in her sorcery, even in the means she uses against a smooth-tongued deserter, Billie is Medea.

Unlike Medea, she isn't a monster. All the play's clever allusions, all the magic in its web, wouldn't mean much if the central relationship didn't hold in its own right, and if the dialogue, however highly charged, didn't make sense as conversation. There is still a sexual current between this couple, and its complications can be bitingly funny; the personal is definitely political, as the two hurl accusations about their shared past, about their finances (she supported him through college, he can't or won't do the same for her), about colour and race.

Billie has a wonderfully rebellious speech on this last equation: "Who called us Black anyway? It's not a racial category, it isn't even the colour of my skin." Momentarily she seems in the same camp as Othello who, among other things, casts strong, elegant doubts on the idea of affirmative action; but then, as Billie more or less points out, having climbed that ladder himself he can afford to throw it away.

Nigel Shawn Williams is an excellent Othello, both in his shifty troubled contemporary form and in the occasional intimations of his tortured namesake. Karen Robinson doesn't have the lightest touch of any actress in the world, but her power, which includes an aggressive wit, does fine for Billie. Barbara Barnes-Hopkins as Billie's landlady and Sophia Walker as her supportive sister-in-law have entertaining moments but they don't fill the space. The remaining character is Billie's long-absent father who arrives half- way through, looking to mend fences; he's come in from Nova Scotia and is actually called Canada. (There was a famous black American actor named Canada Lee, and in a play as steeped in theatrical lore as this one, I'd be surprised if that didn't mean something.) Walter Borden doesn't give him much more than muted geniality, but I doubt if it's his fault that the play begins to fall apart when he comes on. The whole conception of the character is sentimental, despite some initial skirmishing, and the play's Canadian content seems like an add-on. There is a tie-in, of course, with the yearnings of the Civil War couple for Canada, and specifically for N.S.; but that's a whole other play. There's already more than enough going on in this one.