Harlem Duet reframes Othello as a story of love, betrayal, and the Black experience
Marci T. House and Donald Sales star in the Bard on the Beach performance of Djanet Sears’s “rhapsodic blues tragedy”
Donald Sales and Marci T. House in Harlem Duet.
Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival presents Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears at Sen̓ ákw/Vanier Park from June 15 to July 17; opening is June 21
HARLEM DUET, by Toronto playwright Djanet Sears, reframes Shakespeare’s Othello to explore what it means to be Black in North America through one couple’s story of love and betrayal. With flashbacks, it’s set over three distinct periods: 1860, before the US Emancipation Proclamation, the two planning an escape to Canada on the Underground Railroad; 1928, during New York’s Harlem Renaissance, when a classical actor can only find roles in minstrel shows; and post-civil rights 1997, when a teacher at Columbia University walks out on his wife to marry a white colleague. In all three settings, the same “Othello” yearns for access to the white world.
Sears, whose father was Guyanese and mother Jamaican, called the play “a rhapsodic blues tragedy [that] explores the effects of race and sex on the lives of people of African descent”, the non-chronological prequel to Shakespeare's tragedy weaving “a rich tapestry of love, revenge, loyalty and madness”.
The year after its 1997 debut at Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre, Harlem Duet won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award. In 2006, it was performed at the Stratford Festival, the first Black work to be produced in the festival's 54-year history and the first to be helmed by a Black director.
Now, Harlem Duet is coming to Vancouver, as part of the 2022 season of Bard on the Beach.
“The play itself, being done at this festival, is historic in itself: it’s the first time they’re doing a Black playwright here at Bard, and the first time we have a Black female director [Cherissa Richards] here at Bard,” says Marci T. House, who has appeared in past Bard productions Lysistrata, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus and who, in Harlem Duet, plays Billie/She/Her, opposite Donald Sales as Othello/He/Him. “I wanted to be part of something so historic here at the festival.
“Then once I read the script, I was so impressed with the language, so impressed with the characters, and so impressed with the story and the research; it’s a smart, smart script,” House adds. “I left the script asking: Do we need to have a Djanet Sears festival? Her writing is just as brilliant as anything I’ve ever read—just as detailed, just as spectacular. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful piece.”
House is connecting with Stir via Zoom along with Sales during a lunch-hour rehearsal break. Sales, too, was immediately drawn into the complex, provocative script.
“I only had two sheets of paper with words on them, and reading those words I could taste the words,” Sales says. “It’s so rare when actors get material that really touches you in a way you can feel it, you can sense it. Once I read the beginning stages of the play, I knew I wanted to embody these words.
“DJanet Sears has a way to speak from all perspectives,” he says. “She spoke in a way that’s not just Othello, not just Billie, but she speaks to the world through this play.”
Marci T. House.
Donald Sales.
While the two artists are proud and excited to be part of such a respected, acclaimed work, there’s no denying the fact that it’s a first for aforementioned reasons is frustrating. “It’s tiring, to be honest,” House says. “It’s tiring we’re still having firsts in 2022. It seems like every decade we’re still doing firsts. It’s just a sad reality. There is so much segregation in the way we think of each other. I had one of our castmates talking about the history of theatre here in Vancouver, and she remembers calling a theatre company that shall remain nameless and was told ‘We’re not doing any Black plays this year.’ These are the microaggressions we deal with every day, all the time. I’d like to think we’ve moved forward and I’m sure in some places we have, but it doesn’t feel a lot like it.
“I’ve been doing this literally since I was a child, and I still see things that make you question whether you should self-segregate because oftentimes you’ll still be at the control or still under the guise of our white playwrights, our white theatre companies, our white theatre institutions,” House says. “Or when we’re doing a program and there’s a great role and you’re the maid; it's rarely the lead. We’re still fighting for that. It’s sad that we’re still here in 2022. I’m afraid that in 2032, if the planet is still here, that some other Black artist will be sitting in this seat having this same conversation.”
Sales adds: “The industry is just starting slowly to open up to diversity. I think the world is asking for it….We’ve been waiting. We’re here. We’re ready.”
Harlem Duet, the actors say, is timeless, its issues of love and race relatable across generations.
“The reason why we're still studying Shakespeare is because the themes are still relevant, and this is no different,” House says. “She could have written this 50 years ago or 100 years ago, and it will be just as relevant on its 50th, 75th, or 100th anniversary. The names and locations may change, but the story is the same: We are still the victims of our inability to change and to really find the humanity in each other, and she taps so deeply into that in so many ways….The deeper we get into it, every day I see all the colour, I hear the jazz. It’s so rich and so full.”
What’s magical about the play for the actors, Sales says, is that unlike Shakespeare, Sears’s script allows them to dive into their own history and apply it to the play.
“That’s very rare where you’re doing something classical,” Sales says. “With Shakespeare, it has its own style to it, whereas this is very jazz. This is very New York Harlem. This is very Black, if I can say that. It’s really nice to be able to go back to my childhood and bring it back to something like this. That’s what’s been powerful in terms of the process for me. I’ve really been able to dig into old memories and just pay homage to a lot of things I witnessed as a youth growing up.”
Sales sees Harlem Duet’s Othello as someone who’s reaching for something more, longing to discover who he is, and crying out for support, which he gets from the women he’s surrounded by. “He’s very desperate in his search to be complete, to be whole as a man, as a Black man, in the society he’s grown up in,” Sales says.
House describes Billie as an intellectual who asks the hard questions and “says the quiet parts out loud”. “She believes in the unity of Black people,” House says. “One of her lines is ‘We religiously seek to have what they have,’ access to the white man’s world, to the white man’s jobs; she is constantly torn between trying to achieve this Black unity while living in a white world that doesn’t really allow for it.
“The play speaks to mental-health issues, it speaks to racism, it speaks to bigotry, it speaks to internalized racism… The powers are still unbalanced,” she adds. “Time has moved forward, and maybe we’re not in physical shackles anymore, we're not in physical bondage, but everything is the same.”
Bard’s production also features Liza Huget as Magi, Billie’s landlady, and Marsha Regis as Billie’s sister-in-law, Amah. Tom Pickett (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Twelfth Night) plays Billie’s estranged father, Canada. Composer and musical director John “Adidam” Littlejohn and sound designer Malcolm Dow have created a soundscape that blends original music and arrangements performed live on-stage by musicians Alexander Boynton Jr. (bass) and Marlene Ginader (violin).
One of House’s favourite parts of performing in general is seeing how audiences react, and she’s especially curious to see how people will respond to Harlem Duet.
“I hope people are open to it,” House says. “There are some tough subjects in the play that these audiences may not be used to. I hope there’s openness among the viewers, acceptance of sorts, because there is truth in the play. There’s a lot of truths Djanet has put in there, and most of the time, truths are hard to bear. I find it interesting in all the theatre I’ve done throughout the country, from the Shaw festival to Toronto to Winnipeg to Calgary to here… It seems that no matter which market I’m in, it’s a predominantly white market. Those markets are always very comfortable with us being the sidebar or being the servant or the helpmate to the white lead in the white story. This isn’t that story, so I’m wondering how it’s going to hit their ears, how they’re going to respond.
“I feel very fortunate, because Donald is such a wonderful actor I walk off scene sometimes with my heart in my hands because he’s broken it,” she says. “I wonder ‘Will they hear that? Will they see that? Will they hear the truth of what's being said?’ There’s an infinite amount of storytelling, ways to tell stories, and a vast number of bards; it’s not just Shakespeare. I’m hoping they hear these beautiful words, and I hope we do it justice because it deserves all the justice in the world.”
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