THEATRE REVIEW:
THE POWER OF HARRIET T!

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
12 FEB 2013
R: 3/5

Pictured:
Dienye Waboso, Oyin Oladejo


TORONTO - Those who doubt the up-hill battle women face — who dispute that a successful woman must be able to do everything a man can do and do it twice as well — consider this: Moses only returned to Egypt once before he lead his people out of slavery to a land of milk and honey — and for that, a whole book of the Bible has been devoted to his exploits. An escaped black slave named Harriet Tubman, on the other hand, returned to the land of her enslavement numerous times to lead her people out — and she’s been all but forgotten. Mind you, in the promised land to which Tubman delivered her people — a place called Canada —  milk and honey might be frozen for months on end, but freedom was on tap year ’round.


Happily, a century after her death, the life of this escaped slave who became one of the most celebrated conductors on the Underground Railroad is being examined in a play titled THE POWER OF HARRIET T!, which opened on at Young People’s Theatre last week to mark Black History Month.
Written by Michael Miller and directed by Tanisha Taitt, THE POWER… is, in the main, a worthy endeavour, if one is prepared to discount the lacklustre musical contributions of Alejandra Nunez — a series of forgettable songs that not only add nothing to the tale, but serve to interrupt its flow in the process.


Tubman is well played as a young woman by Oyin Oladejo and, in her older incarnation, by Dienye Waboso, who often acts as mentor and helpmate to Tubman’s younger self as the script asks each to slip in and out of supporting roles as the story unfolds. With Michael Blake, Matthew Owen Murray and Hannah Cheesman in a range of supporting roles, Tubman’s story unfolds on an attractive set designed by Kimberly Purtell and lit by Rebecca Picherack.


But while Miller’s story does a fine job of documenting the things that drove Tubman to seek freedom, examining not only the appalling conditions of slavery in the American South while it celebrates the Underground Railway in which Tubman served such a pivotal role, its focus on her early life seems all wrong. For, while Exodus certainly touches on the bondage Moses’s people endured, what resonates today is not that bondage, but rather a leader’s willingness to risk everything in a flight to a better life.
 That’s the flight Tubman made more than a dozen times, according to most history books, before serving the Union side in the American Civil War, as a cook, a nurse and as a spy. And frankly, while the suffering she endured as a slave — the suffering  her people endured — should never be forgotten, it is her tremendous spirit, her indomitable will, her unflagging courage and finally what she did with her hard-won freedom that deserves to be celebrated.