Ordena Stephens-Thompson and Walter Borden in Harlem Duet, at the Tarragon Theatre, in Toronto.Cylla von Tiedemann
- Title: Harlem Duet
- Written by: Djanet Sears
- Genre: Rhapsodic blues tragedy
- Director: Djanet Sears
- Actors: Virgilia Griffith, Beau Dixon, Walter Borden
- Company: Tarragon Theatre
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to Oct. 28, 2018
Harlem Duet is back at Tarragon Theatre, on the main stage, 21 years after the “rhapsodic blues tragedy” by Djanet Sears had its world premiere in the Toronto theatre’s smaller Extra Space.
I like that: 21 years, not 20. Anniversary productions of award-winning plays can feel so perfunctory; this feels more like an urgent revival timed to the moment of a show that just happens to have reached drinking age in the United States.
A riff on and response to Shakespeare’s Othello, Harlem Duet did rack up the awards back in the day – a Dora, a Chalmers and a Governor-General’s Award, all before it became the first script by a black Canadian to be produced at the Stratford Festival (in 2006!).
The play does, as the title implies, take place in Harlem, in the apartment of a recently broken-up black couple.
Billie (Virgilia Griffith) has been in bed for two months mourning her relationship with her partner of nine years, a university professor who happens to be named Othello (Beau Dixon), and who has left her for a white woman in his department who happens to be named Mona (as in Desde-).
As the play begins, downstairs neighbour Magi (Ordena Stephens-Thompson) is making coffee in the kitchen for Billie’s sister-in-law, Amah (Tiffany Martin), and talking about Billie’s restless sleeps, “dreaming hard … like she’s on some archeological dig of the unconscious mind.”
Indeed, interspersed with present-day reality are scenes from that dream-world dig – some set in 1860 in the American South, right before the Emancipation Proclamation, others in 1928 backstage at a theatre during the Harlem Renaissance. In each era, however, the plot stays the same: A black man abandons a black woman for a white woman and shortly after meets his doom.
Mona’s whiteness fuels Billie’s jealous daytime ruminations as well as her nighttime rhapsodies – and when Othello shows up for his stuff, the intersection of race and relationships becomes ground zero for some powerful debate between the ex-partners over their different African-American ideologies.
At one point, Amah suggests Billie may be too obsessed with the colour of Mona’s skin – and reminds her that she tells her niece that colour is only skin-deep. “The skin holds everything in," replies Billie in one of the play’s most memorable lines. "It’s the largest organ in the human body. Slash the skin by my belly and my intestines fall out.”
Though it owes more to a dialectical dramatic tradition from Bernard Shaw to Tony Kushner than to Shakespeare, Harlem Duet is a prequel of sorts to Othello.
Billie has a certain strawberry-spotted handkerchief of her ex’s that she plans to return to him – once she’s finished marinating it in a magic potion that will bring doom to those who touch it. Teetering on the edge of madness, will her desire for revenge on a man who left her in the lurch last, once her estranged Nova Scotian father (the wonderful Walter Borden) shows up to make amends?
The primary reason to see this Tarragon production is Griffith’s commanding performance as Billie – a brilliant blend of intelligence and emotion. She vibrates with aliveness at all times in the three-pronged part she plays, even in the most written passages set in the visions of the past. She and Dixon have a fine, tragic chemistry.
As with the play’s debut production, and the Stratford production in 2006, Sears directs her own writing – and she elegantly navigates Griffith, Dixon and Borden through what could be sharp shifts in tone and time as a cellist and bass player accompany the action on a beautiful deconstructed set designed by Astrid Janson. The performances by Stephens-Thompson and, especially, Martin aren’t as anchored in the world of the play.
In theory, I’d like Sears to pass the baton so we could hear the play sing under a new conductor at this point – but, in practice, she delivers an assured production that is hard to complain about.
With Harlem Duet, she took the basis for what could be a domestic drama and created an era-spanning epic that comments on what it is to be black then and now in North America. It’s meaty and a bit messy with snippets of speeches from Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King laid over blues and jazz interludes.
Probably even more now than when it premiered, Harlem Duet confidently makes its case that the past is not dead, it’s not even past (as Barack Obama says in a recording, quoting William Faulkner) – that the legacy of slavery and (continuing) white supremacy reverberates not only in political and economic matters but through black bodies and into their relationships.