for colored girls who have considered suicide ... (a laying on of hands)

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

Shange, "no more love poems #4" - for colored girls
lady in red

In rehearsal again. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In honour of Ntozake Shange, who died last year, and of Theresa Moxey-Ingraham, who also died last year, and who was in our original production of colored girls in 2014.This play, this production, gives me joy. And joy is important.

i brought you what joyi found & i found joy

Shange, "no more love poems #1" - for colored girls
lady in orange

My life over the past year has changed, shifted somewhat. One year ago, I almost died. My kidneys had an adverse reaction to medication/anaesthesia after an exploratory gynaecological procedure and shut down. Acute renal failure, they called it. An insidious way to die. Because I didn't feel as though I was really ill. I just felt unwell. For ten days, I vomited on a regular basis. I couldn't eat solid food; whatever I tried to chew and swallow came back up. I was weak, had a dull back pain that felt like trapped gas. I thought I was battling some strange stomach bug, or suffering from food poisoning. But it didn't get better.Ten days after the procedure, a diagnosis: renal failure. Admission to hospital for a week. Two rounds of dialysis to see if the kidneys would kick back in. They did. Then a month of recovery while I regained my strength. All this while on unpaid leave from the university to focus on research, writing, and Shakespeare in Paradise.While I was on leave, my colleagues in Social Sciences very thoughtfully and kindly elected me to be their chair. So when I returned from leave last August I took up residence in the chair's office in Social Sciences. A real life-changer: the chair's teaching load is one course per year.One course. Per year. The rest of the time is administration and paperwork—which I can do, but which I prefer to leave to other people. Thanks, Social Sciences.So the theatre is my saviour, as it always is.

we gotta dance to keep from dyin

Shange, "i'm a poet who" - for colored girls
lady in brown

coloredgirlscurtain.jpg

But this play.I originally directed it in 2014 out of a sense of duty. This sense came from two directions. One was the fact that our theatre company, Ringplay Productions, had just assumed the management of the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, and the first thing we did—the very first thing—was convert the building behind the big theatre, which had once been a rehearsal hall and a workshop, and which had spent the better part of a decade as somebody's church, into a black box theatre. At that time it was a flexible space, a literal black box that could be configured any which way you wanted. Something had to open it.Two years before that, I had taught a class, Introduction to Theatre, in which one of the plays we studied was Shange's for colored girls... . The students loved the play, so much so that they begged me to direct it. I wasn't ready then. We didn't have a theatre home, and rehearsal was expensive and challenging because we had no permanent rehearsal space. And I didn't feel right about directing the production for any of the big stages that we have floating around the place. colored girls is an intimate work. It is deeply honest and personal. Any performance of it needs no separation from the audience. So I held off.But the Black Box was different. It had six entrances to the performance space, all the way around the space. The performers and the audience had no separation at all. So I decided we would work there, in that space, on that floor, and that the women would perform in the centre of the space and the audience would sit in a circle around.So we produced it. It opened the Black Box, introduced Bahamian audiences to a different kind of theatrical immediacy, a different kind of experience. The women danced and moved among them. They touched the audience—physically, sometimes. If audience members fell asleep, as one poor man did, the women woke them up, with a sharp rap on the shoulder or the thigh. There were only two rows of seats all the way around the space. The performers could touch anyone in the audience, and vice versa. It was electric and wonderful and Shange's work was full of strength and power and healing.

i found god in myself& i loved her / i loved her fiercely

Shange, "a layin on of hands" - for colored girls
lady in red/orange

And it is again healing. The play conveys pain, and anger, and despair, and outrage, and hurt. But it also sings joy, and hope, power, and—above all—healing. These are things that slip away over the years, things that one forgets, things that one finds are swallowed up with the everyday.These are things that surprised me when I came to direct the play. Because I had read it, and I had taught it. And there were moments in the play I've always found luminous, powerful, which spoke personally to me: moments like "no assistance" or "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff", powerful, angry, strong pieces.But there were also other moments I would skip over when reading, and groan silently when teaching: places where the words were too thick on the page, or where the stories seemed tedious or overwritten, or where there was just too much emotion. I won't tell you what they were, because they are no longer.Directing this play, watching the words embodied, playing with the delivery, finding the spaces and the secrets and the possibilities in Shange's words, putting those words to music, putting the poems in space—this process lifts me up, heals me, every time. Every time. This is a work that is meant to be performed. It is a work that has to be danced, to be moved. Voice is not enough for this work. It needs dance and music and colour. It is fully and wonderfully theatre, and directing it heals me.

i was missin somethinga layin on of hands

Shange, "a layin on of hands" - for colored girls
lady in blue/purple

A lot of this, I have to say, is thanks to the wonderful cast of women I worked with, both in 2014, and again now in 2019. In 2014, they were:

Arthellia Powell-Isaacs - lady in brownAleah Carey - rainbowTheresa Moxey-Ingraham - lady in yellowMyra McPhee - lady in blueClaudette Allens - lady in redErin Knowles - lady in orangeOniké Archer - lady in purpleMichaella Forbes - lady in green

We have lost three members of the original cast. Aleah Carey and Myra McPhee now live abroad. And last year, Theresa Moxey-Ingraham, our beloved Yellow, died. And so did Ntozake Shange. Both from illness; both before their time. Our revival this year is in their honour.So we're remounting this production with a few changes, and two new cast members. In 2014, we added a character, the Rainbow, whose youth and innocence was healing and challenging at the same time. She got lines from speeches assigned to Brown, Red, and took part in ensemble pieces. But now, without her, we are going back to the original idea, where the lady in brown (the amalgamation of all the colours, the colour of our mothers, the colour of Mother Earth) is the healer, the mother. And we are welcoming two new actors to the ensemble. This year's production features:

Arthellia Powell-Isaacs - lady in brownYasmin Glinton - lady in yellowValene Rolle - lady in blueClaudette Allens - lady in redErin McKinney (née Knowles) - lady in orangeOniké Archer - lady in purpleMichaella Forbes - lady in green

We have another challenge, too. The Black Box was renovated and reconfigured. Audiences had trouble seeing plays which were performed in the traditional set-up in the Black Box, so we introduced raised seating. This fixed the orientation of the performances and made it less flexible. We can't do the play in the round anymore. So we have had to adjust.So. The Black Box still has six entrances, but we now mostly use four. But we've opened up a fifth one and this performance will flip the script on the last one. Last time, the women performed in the centre of the circle. This time, the audience might be surrounded.Nuff said. You want to see it? Call the Dundas and book. Or check out Eventbrite and buy online. But don't be missin something.This is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows.

Shakespeare in Paradise 2014

The thing about running a theatre festival is how fast things go. Only last week we were opening the student matinees, with our local, age-appropriate production of Romeo and Juliet; last weekend the Ringplay production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf revived itself for four final shows; and last night, Sizwe Banzi is Dead opened to an almost full house in the Black Box Theatre at the Dundas.It's a pretty busy time for me. For us in Ringplay Productions and for all of us at Shakespeare in Paradise. Ringplay has inherited a theatre, and the festival has developed a reputation. When we started, we had difficulty selling the idea of a Shakespeare festival to teachers and the schools. Not to all of them, you understand; but especially to the teachers in the government school system. Shakespeare had his own reputation--of being unintelligible and impossible to teach. We would get responses from teachers or, more often, from administrators like: "Our kids won't understand Shakespeare" (what they really meant was we don't understand Shakespeare) and "We're not studying that play so it's a waste of time for our students to be released". But this year? Our student matinees are pretty well sold out, and we have eight of them. And they're not just sold out to private school children. And the schools are not just bringing a single senior class. Schools--public schools and private schools--are booking sixty or ninety seats at a time.Of course, that could simply be the impact of Romeo and Juliet, which EVERYONE studies at some point in their lives, or it could be the residual effect of last year's The Legend of Sammie Swain.  I'm hoping it's something more, though. I'm hoping that the fact that the festival is here, the fact it exists at all, is changing the culture of these students' world just a little bit.I happen to believe the idea that theatre and democracy are linked. The acting process itself is an exercise in empathy; you have to put away who you are and step into the shoes of another person. To do it right you have to inhabit that other person's world, at least for a time. You have to shoulder that person's burdens and endure that person's pain. And the process of being in a live theatre audience requires less passivity in theatre than it does for television or cinema; as an audience member, you share the same space and time as the performers, and there is an electricity that is generated when the theatre is good. A bad night out at the theatre is far worse than a bad night out at the movies because the engagement is different, and a good night out at the theatre is, as the Greeks understood, transformative.I'm hoping that that's what's happening for at least some of the students whose schools understand the wisdom of letting them attend the matinees.And so. Shakespeare in Paradise 2014 slides towards its second weekend. Sizwe Banzi kicks ass; For Colored Girls moved people to laughter and to tears; and the teenaged performers in Romeo and Juliet have come into their own, and are making their peers laugh out lout and, maybe, cry just a little. And I hope, I just hope, we are changing the world a tiny bit every time.

Today's the day

Shakespeare in Paradise 2014 soft-opens today with the first student matinee of Romeo and Juliet.I'm juggling many plates! Keeping them all in the air is challenging at the very least, and the beginning of October is the time when they all fly up and some of them come crashing down. The one I always have to catch and keep from shattering, though, is Shakespeare in Paradise.This year's festival opens on Friday coming, but Romeo and Juliet goes into previews with four student matinees. Our matinees are sold out--high schools from all over the country (I kid you not!) are sending students to see the production.  Really. There is a school group flying in from Inagua, with Morton Salt's help. Our festival has hit the (mini) big time.That's the main reason I haven't posted as I would like here. I have scores of ideas but sitting down to write them requires an hour here and there that I can't always find. Still -- take advantage of what you have, Nico, so here you go.SiP 2014's train's a-rollin'. And I'm rollin' right on with it.

Notebook of a Return to our Theatre Home

I'm sitting in the dark lighting booth of the Dundas Theatre, running lights and sound for the Ringplay production of 12 Angry Men. The play has an easy first act for me: lights up at the beginning, fast fade and music at the end. All the focus is on the stage.It's coming up on thirty years since I first started my apprenticeship in theatre on the Dundas stage. I returned home from university in 1986 with an intention of writing plays. It had something to do with Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but that's another story; but somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that if I wanted to write plays I should have some experience in being in them. So in January 1987 I made my debut as part of the Dundas Repertory Season. And so began what would become an unofficial career.In the beginning, all was well. I started on stage, although my real interest was behind the scenes. I had spent two years at university learning how to stage manage productions, serving as regisseuse for the St. Michael's French theatre (and, yes, doing it all in French. Um.), and I had also spent two years doing creative writing (which was a mere seminar as part of my Literature degree, as Creative Writing was not, in those days at the self-important University of Toronto, a valid degree) and coming to the conclusion that if I wrote prose I would probably never be read in my own country. I was working on adapting one of the stories I produced for my creative writing seminar into a play, and I wanted to know first-hand what I ought to think about. And so I found myself one summer at a workshop being given at the Dundas by Philip Burrows.The workshop changed my life, though I didn't know it then. It threw me so far out of my comfort zone it took me a good decade or so to find my way back. It also brought into my life the people I consider my closest circle of friends outside of family--and, thanks to subsequent events, it made some of those people my actual family too. Jane Poveromo, Sammie Bethell, Marcel Sherman, Cookie Allens, David Burrows, Gavin Collins, Alayne Patur and, of course Philip Burrows--these were the people I met for the first time in that workshop. We did exercises and we did monologues, and then we were presented with monologues and scenes that were specially written for the workshop, pieces written by Winston Saunders at Philip's request. Those monologues would eventually become I, Nehemiah, Remember When..., but I didn't get to do any, because I took up an adjunct position at COB, teaching West Indian Literature (and that particular class was another story) and had to drop out; the class clashed with Philip's workshop.But the workshop led to a call from Philip, just before Christmas. "I need a stage manager," he told me. "I'm holding a reading for a play and I want you to come out." So I turned out for the reading, which was held in the half-dark on the Dundas stage. The play was a peculiar piece. It was called The Rimers of Eldritch and it was by an American playwright I had never heard of, but whom I would later count among my favourite writers: Lanford Wilson. It was about small town midwestern America, a place which seemed ordinary but which was sinister, and was about a rape and a murder and the injustice that goes with prejudice. And it was not linear, and I loved it. I loved the reading and I wanted to be the stage manager.And at the end of the reading, Philip said to me:"I guess you know you've got the part."I spent the next six weeks in shock. But the rehearsal process introduced me to more people, luminaries and names of the local theatre. There were David and Gavin and Alayne and Cookie and Marcel and Sammie and Jane and me, all the people from the workshop. But there were other people in it too, people I had seen on stage or had heard of but who hadn't been in the workshop: Angela Scott and Jeanne Thompson and Heather Thompson and Bonny Byfield and Rudy Levarity and Stephen Burrows and Liz Gottlieb and not least of all Anthony Delaney. And we worked together to create a strange and haunting and memorable ensemble piece that marked my first serious appearance (with actual lines) on the Dundas stage.But this is a digression. I was talking about our return to the Dundas, not my beginning there. I'm sitting in the lighting booth watching 12 Angry Men. For reasons that are too long and complex to go into right now, the people I met in 1987 left the Dundas (or, more accurately, were no longer needed by the Dundas). We moved on, formed our own independent company, went on to produce theatre in other forms and other places, establishing among other things Shakespeare in Paradise. We were away for some 16 years. And then, this past March, we took over the management of the theatre. I was going to say "again" but that wouldn't strictly be accurate; we managed the Season before, which occupied the Dundas for between five and nine months of the year, but we never managed the theatre itself. Now, though, we are the managers of the theatre as a whole. And it is like—it is in fact—a return home.Watch that space.