6.23.2006
Harlem Duet with Shakespeare?
"Stratford’s Shakespearean festival is one of Canada’s oldest and most distinguished theatrical institutions. It’s also about as multicoloured as a loaf of Wonder Bread." That's the cue for Djanet Sears' entrance into the Stratford festival this year, as the first black director of the first black work to grace the festival's 54 year tradition of cracker-osity. Harlem Duet rewrites Othello into a modern New York setting, where his love is divided between his pasty white colleague, Mona, and his his black wife of nine years, Billie. Though the script itself is highly entertaining and accessible (I read it while TAing for a second year class), the characters' actions are underpinned by a dizzying awareness of the endless problematics created by class and integration, African-American history, and the places where gender politics intersect with racial. According to Sears and the article this particular production is so "sexy and racy" that it has left the actors eating salads and swearing off beer...
