Featuring excellent core performance by Mercy T. House, the Harlem Duet jumps directly into provocative racial debates.
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Harlem Duet
When:Until July 17th
Location:Señákw / VanierPark
Ticket&Information:From $ 27bardonthebeach.org
What if Othello's first wife was black? What if Othello left her in her white Desdemona? And what if the setting wasn't in Venice and Cyprus in the 16th century, but in the Harlem of the 20th century and the southern part before the Civil War?
Canadian playwright Djanet Sears imagines these transformations in the Harlem Duet and makes his Vancouver debut at Bird on the Beach as the festival continues to seek more text and cultural diversity. And complement Shakespeare's Kanon with a play that riffs with a bird.
Featuring a stunning core performance by Mercy T. House, the Harlem Duet jumps directly into a provocative debate about race. House plays Billy, a graduate student whose husband, Othello (Donald Sails), a Colombian professor, left her to Mona, a white colleague that her audience never sees. She exists only as a behind-the-scenes voice.
Most of the play takes place in 1997 at Harlem's apartment in the iconic corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevard. The perspective of the play is mainly Billy's perspective. She is deeply depressed by the collapse of her marriage and exudes her jealous anger in a conversation between her landlady Magi (fun Liza Huget) and her sister-in-law Ama (Masha Regis).
Billy feels she was doubly betrayed. Othello leaving her for a white woman confirms all her thoughts on how American racial decks are stacked. In her eyes, he is not only a adulterer, but also a racial traitor. He agrees that racism is everywhere in his life and profession, but bets his claim on liberal humanism. "At a deeper level, we are all the same," he claims. "I'm not my skin."
It's hard to feel a lot of sympathy for Othello when he's barely sensitive to Billy's feelings. At the same time, Billy's clear feminism is overwhelmed by what even black women's friends consider to be her racial obsession, and she plans to murder Othello and Mona through the infamous handkerchief. Can stand.
When Billy's estranged father Canada (Tom Pickett) arrives from Nova Scotia, his personality and Pickett's gentle and charming performance provide a counterweight to Othello's abandonment of Billy. Woman. Inside the modern action are scenes of slave farms and the 1920s harem theater. In this theater, House and Sales play a couple that directly resembles Billy and Othello.
Director Celissa Richards apartments these flashbacks, primarily by changing costumes. It integrates relatively smoothly into the set — some beautiful outfits by the set and Rachel Forbes — it's never completely clear what's going on in them. The stage composition of Bird's little tent is a long straight set with the audience sitting in a semicircle, looking at the actor's back with awkward gaze and too many moments. Also, many of the narration speeches that precede each scene are unclear. I could understand Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Langston Hughes, but the rest were on stagebass guitar (Alexander Boynton Jr.) and{117. } Violin (Marlene Ginander).
None of them interfere with the main story of the play. Like Shakespeare, biting the wrath of jealousy and murder can destroy the central figure as well as the target of revenge. There is such madness. MarciHouse's performanceprovides a powerful and detailed description of Billy's struggle against growing madness exacerbated by the chronic wasting disease ofracism.
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