Redbone Coonhound: How a mixed-race couple's encounter with a certain dog breed gave rise to a biting new play
Vancouver playwrights Omari Newton and Amy Lee Lavoie dish on how a casual walk led to heated discussions about race, power, and privilege—and their first co-write as a married pair
Redbone Coonhound.
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Redbone Coonhound to October 30 at the Newmont Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre
MARRIED VANCOUVER PLAYWRIGHTS Omari Newton and Amy Lee Lavoie are dog lovers, proud parents to two Dalmatians named Joni Itchell and Stevie Licks. Several years ago, before they had their own pups, the two were out for a walk when an athletic white man jogged by with a red dog in tow, the animal taking particular interest in Newton, sniffing him and barking. Newton asked the fellow what kind of dog it was. The response hit Newton, who is black, and Lavoie, who’s white, in very different ways. It was a Redbone Coonhound.
“I was like, What?’” Newton tells Stir in a phone interview. “We walked away, and I said to my wife, ‘Did he just say Redbone Coonhound?’ In the Black community, redbone is a slang term to define a mixed race, and coon, obviously, is a racial slur that is one of the worst things one Black person could say to another. So I was completely taken aback. I thought the dog breed had an association with slavery in the South. I was like ‘That’s such an offensive name.’ How does that name still exist?’”
Lavoie—a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s playwriting program whose past works include C’mon Angie! and Rabbit Rabbit—recalls her husband’s reaction at the time, sharing with Stir: “Omari’s face fell and his body language immediately changed. I clocked it, but didn’t totally understand why. I was aware of the breed, being a bit of a dog fanatic, so I was receiving the words Redbone Coonhound with that context. I wasn’t offended. I was simply being told something I already knew. It was a privilege I had that I didn’t fully comprehend at the time.”
Lavoie listened to Newton (an actor, voice actor, and slam poet whose previous playwriting credits include Sal Capone and Black & Blue Matters) as he worked out why the dog’s name had such an impact on him. She in turn shared what she knew about the breed with him.
“My stance was that the dog didn’t name itself,” Lavoie says. “The dog is operating with the DNA created for it by men, and a Redbone Coonhound isn’t a Bloodhound, which Omari had been conflating it with. It was bred to tree raccoons. I thought maybe by divorcing those two breeds from one another in the horrific images playing in Omari’s head, the name could be separated from the dog and some comfort could be found. That wasn’t the point, of course.
“Omari was understandably upset by the breed name, and by the lack of awareness on the part of the white male owner,” Lavoie adds. “The interaction made him feel uneasy — an effect that lasted quite a while. It was yet another example of the insidiousness of racism.”
Amy Lee Lavoie and Omari Newton.
The pair’s conversation continued, sometimes becoming rather intense.
“Our different entry points into the conversation about the dog unearthed some interesting discussions about the power of language, intent versus impact, childhood and upbringing, and pop culture.” Lavoie says. “Some of these conversations were heated because they touched on some of the uncomfortable truths about our interracial marriage: there are experiences we can never truly, fully understand about the other person. We navigate the world in different bodies that are perceived very differently.”
Fast forward a few months later, and over dinner the two were talking about an idea Newton had for a play. It made Lavoie think back to all the conversations that that encounter on the seawall had sparked in their own lives. “Omari told me the working title,” she recalls. “I said, “that’s the wrong title. It should be called Redbone Coonhound. And the dog should become the thematic prodder for a series of micro plays that are provoked by a throughline of the protagonist.’ We spent the dinner riffing off that idea, and we decided we should write it together. Our first co-write as a married couple.”
Described as “hard-hitting comedy meets searing social commentary”, Redbone Coonhound is the Arts Club’s first “rolling world premiere”; after its initial run in Vancouver, the play will have a second premiere in Toronto and Montreal shared by Tarragon Theatre and Imago Theatre. A 2022 Arts Club Silver Commission, originally adapted into an audio play for the 2021-22 Listen to This series, Redbone Coonhound is co-directed by Newton and Ashleigh Corcoran. It features Jesse Lipscombe and Emma Slipp as Mike and Emma respectively, an interracial couple that ends up exploring and debating everything from oppression and race to gender and power, topics that transcend borders. Also performing are Kwesi Ameyaw, Sebastien Archibald, Nancy Kerr, Gerry Mackay, and Emerjade Simms.
Newton recalls a question he and Lavoie received from an African American actor who had auditioned for the play; he wondered why it was set in Canada. “I asked him what he meant,” Newton says. “He said, ‘Well, the subject matter, being about race and identity, it’s clearly an American story.’ I had to explain to him, as an African Canadian, that it’s very much a Canadian story; we have all the same issues in this country that they do in the U.S.”
And theatre is an especially powerful vehicle to get at those issues, Lavoie says.
“Redbone Coonhound bred a series of big, complicated ideas that revealed themselves in highly theatrical ways,” Lavoie says. “We wanted to take big swings and play around with form. We wanted to do that in a sandbox that was familiar to us and allowed us to take a micro/macro approach to the arguments of the play. What better sandbox for that than a stage?
“It provides proximity — unique to the medium — to those big, complicated ideas, which I think is important,” she says. “It’s wonderful for the gesture of the play to be met with an intimate setting. I’ve always been drawn to the magic of live performance and the idea that a group of strangers can come together and experience something that will never exist like that again.”
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