Profile of Karen Robinson
Actress from Harlem Duet, Adventures of Black Girl in Search of God on Afrika Solo's Djanet Sears
For the first time in 54 years, Ontario's Stratford Shakespearean Festival makes history with an African-Canadian play, an all-black cast and a black director.
Djanet Sears' acclaimed Harlem Duet, set to an innovative blues/jazz motif, commences in a Harlem apartment at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards and tells the tale of African-American collage profs Billie (Karen Robinson) and Othello (Nigel Shawn Williams). After nine years of marriage, Othello leaves Billie for white colleague (Desde)Mona, and Billie - who like King 'had a dream' - finds her fragile world spiraling into a nightmare. As Harlem Duet ends, Othello begins.
First done at Toronto's Nightwood Theatre to rave reviews and accolades, Sears' play takes this recurrent theme of Billie and Othello to the Underground Railroad in the 1860s and black minstrel shows from the 1920s. She actually intersperses it with lines from the play Othello as Williams plays classical Shakespearean actor to Robinson's fiesty blues singer. Together Karen Robinson, Nigel Shawn Williams and Djanet Sears are shaking the audience foundations.
How closely did you and Djanet Sears work on this?
I think Djanet works very closely as a matter of it being her nature, so I wouldn't say, outside the fact that I am lead in the play, that I got any more attention than anyone else because of who Billie is. I was there all the time and I got to talk to Djanet a lot of the time or run from her when she was trying to get me to do stuff that I didn't want to do. But I ended up having to do it anyway because she is the boss of me.
I think Djanet and I to certain extent have a baseline understanding of where Billie is coming from simply because we are two black women - and we have lived it in the last and this century. So we know to a certain extent what it is we are talking about. But Djanet, of course, knows more than I do.
Do you think Othello is doing this because he thinks he can get ahead more if he plays the white man's game?
I think he loves Mona, and that is hard for me to say even as Karen Robinson. He truly does love Mona, but also loves Billie and arguably loves Billie even more. There are contingent factors: his career, his politics, and the constant discourse that Othello encounters in a relationship with Billie that he does not want to have on a daily basis anymore.
Those three and other factors influence his decision to move towards Mona. So I don't think it is just any thing, even though if you see it from Billie's point of view, for her, it's just betrayal. It's just him turning his back upon everything which Billie deems important - not even important - it's the very stuff of life.
The life-force - the blood in the vein in the body of her world and he's just said... no.
How much discomfort is there while people watch? Sears has a lot of potent lines, from "liberation has no colour" to "I am not my skin and my skin is not me," set to stirring soundbites from some of the world's greatest African-American minds - diverse food for thought.
I swear to God there are more black people (in the audience) than I have seen in my two previous seasons here. I have never had an experience except for sitting in the other audiences. I have never acted in the other theatres. (Robinson is in The Duchess of Malfi at Tom Patterson) These audiences - well, when you are onstage you can heeear the audience, you can heeeer the women who are on Billie's side, you can heeeer the ones who hate Othello, you can heeeer the ones who are taken aback when I talk about Canada's [Billie's father] girlfriend from way back when and I say I hated her stubby little beige legs because there are a lot of women in the audience who have beige legs.
You can heeeeer the discomfort when I am talking about Mona, and the hate is coming out of my pores because these women are with black men.
Also the last show we had, there was a lot of laughter in some very odd places, and when that happens - it was Nigel who mentioned it to me when we were talking about it - when that happens, that is usually an indication that people are nervous, uncomfortable and don't know how to react.
Are audiences enlightened by Harlem Duet?
I think so. Judging by the conversations I have had with people or people at the Festival who have never seen anything like this in their lives, because they are around and I'm around, we have an opportunity to talk about it, and it's great for both of us.
I think the important thing is that these conversations begin to happen because otherwise we see our world changing and we see these relationships happening in our lives and we all know people who are in these relationships. But we fool ourselves into thinking that Canada is this nice happy multicultural society where everybody just accepts everybody else and there is no context for it - well, that's not... real.
There are different viewpoints, and there are feelings that need to be honoured and these are conversations that simply have to be had, because there are tiny little truths that are not validated and when that happens, those truths sit there. Nothing is done about them, they are never heard, never aired, and then often they can become quite dangerous because they sit there and they fester and then they become an anger, and all of a sudden, nobody knows where it's coming from.
I am wondering if I am naïve whenever there is conflict that we encounter in this world - could be between best friends or could be between neighboring nations - it usually starts when one side feels like they are not being listened to or acknowledged by the other side - validated or given their rights - and it usually starts there.
