Catching Othello’s echoes in Harlem Duet: A conversation on Shakespearean adaptation, blackness and African Diaspora Theatre with Djanet Sears

Abstract

Caribbean Canadian playwright, actress and director Djanet Sears has created theatre pieces that explore Canadian manifestations of the African diaspora for over three decades. Her works include the autobiographical play Afrika Solo (1990), Double Trouble (1988), The Mother Project (1990), Who Killed Katie Ross (1994) and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (2002). Between 1995 and 1996, Sears developed Harlem Duet (1997), a theatrical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello that explores the intersection of racism and sexism in North American black communities, and how interlocking systems of oppression infiltrate the psyche of black people and their most intimate relationships. In an interview conducted in July 2016 at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Sears discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and early career, the genesis and the making of Harlem Duet, as well as its most important North American productions. She also elucidates how the blues aesthetic and black feminism informed her Shakespearean adaptation of Othello in ways that helped her to counter stereotypical representations of black masculinity and black womanhood produced within dominant discourses.