THEATRE REVIEW:
SHAKESPEARE'S NIGGA

JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
09 FEB 2013
R: 4.5/5



Pictured:Joseph Pierre, Sascha Cole

If Shakespeare knew he was writing for the ages, he might have done things differently — created more empowered women, for instance, or thrown in more cross-cultural casting to stave off carping in the 21st century. Instead, he wisely focused on keeping his audience engaged without offending the sensibilities of the last of the Tudors (who, after all, could not only close him down, but cut off his head). So, 450 years after his birth, hindsight has highlighted the the gaps in his work — and it has fallen to an elite group of daring contemporary playwrights to correct problems created by passing time and changing mores.

In Canada, Anne Marie MacDonald rather famously gave contemporary voice to Shakespeare's women in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), for instance,  and now Joseph Jomo Pierre is doing much the same for the "Moorish" element in Shakespeare's roster in a play titled SHAKESPEARE'S NIGGA. It had its world première at Theatre Passe Muraille Thursday, a production of Obsidian Theatre, in association with TPM (re-establishing itself as one of Toronto's most daring theatres) and 3D Atomic.

As confrontational and subversive as its title implies, SHAKESPEARE'S NIGGA co-opts two of the playwright's most enduring black characters — the brilliant but insecure Othello and the malevolent Aaron, the driving force behind the horror of Titus Andronicus — and pits them in a duel to the death.

Played by Andre Sills and the playwright respectively, Othello and Aaron exist on a time-warped and decaying estate, overseen by an aging and self-satisfied Shakespeare (played by John Jarvis). Both are slaves to the bard, it seems, but there is a vast difference in their station. The ambitious Othello, in fact, has learned to work the system and prospers, while Aaron, the perpetual outsider, rejects the slavery in which he lives despite the whippings and confinement he is forced to endure.

Othello aspires to marry Shakespeare's daughter, Judith, played by Sascha Cole, with whom he has grown up and who is in turn madly in love with Aaron. When Judith's sudden pregnancy collides with a bit of "family lore" mined from the Dark Lady sonnets and served up by the aged house slave Tyrus (David Collins), tragedy of a truly Shakespearean magnitude ensues.

As directed by Philip Akin, this is thought-provoking, often daring stuff — edgy and sensual and subversively seductive, written in a language that honours Shakespeare at the same time as it refuses to be bound by him. Both Pierre and Sills give powerful, considered performances that deserve a stronger foil than Jarvis offers in his Shakespeare-lite turn. For her part, Cole (also cast in an equine supporting role) rises above the costuming excesses of Melanie McNeill and gets to the meat of the matter, while Collins skims fine comedic moments from the surface of his character.

In the main, however, Akin ensures that the real star here is Pierre-as-playwright, eloquently, boldly breaking dramatic chains inadvertently forged over four centuries ago, demanding in very meaningful ways that we look beyond race to define a man.