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Harlem Duet
Harlem Duet
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Author: Djanet Sears Publisher: Scirocco Drama Format: Softcover # of Pages: 118 Pub. Date: 2008 ISBN-10: 1896239277 ISBN-13: 9781896239279 Cast Size: 3 women, 2 men
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About the Play:
Winner of the 1998 Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian
equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)
Harlem Duet is a full-length drama by Djanet Sears.
The critically acclaimed "prequel" to Shakespeare's Othello
transplants the story to Harlem, where a college professor leaves his
grad student wife for a white colleague. The stinging abandonment
leads to profound questions about love, loss, loyalty and race,
played out over two centuries in a wide range of settings.
Harlem Duet is a modernized interpretation of the classic
tragedy Othello, which addresses the question, "Who would
Othello be if he were alive today?" Shakespeare's Othello
provides one of the first portrayals of an African man in western
literature. Djanet Sears' award-winning play hypothesizes that
The Moor who married the much younger Desdemona had a previous wife –
a Black woman. Harlem Duet is told through the eyes of Billie,
a black graduate student studying the mental health of Black people.
She loves and marries Othello, a young black teacher at Columbia
University, only to be left by her husband of nine years for Mona,
his white colleague on the Upper East Side. Billie reels from a
multitude of betrayals, played out over three great periods in
African-American history: set simultaneously on a Southern plantation
in 1860 (before the Emancipation Proclamation), in 1928 during the
Harlem Renaissance, and in contemporary Harlem on the corner of
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevards. Powerful, intense and
emotionally gripping, this Canadian theatre classic packs as powerful
a punch now as it did when it won of the Governor General's Award for
Drama in in 1998.
Harlem Duet was workshopped in 1996 at New York City's
Joseph Papp Public Theatre, where the author was the international
artist-in-residence. The play premiered in 1997 at Tarragon Theatre
in Toronto, Ontario, and went on to win the Governor- General's
Award, the Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the Dora Mavor Moore
Award. Its New York premiere was in 2002 off-Broadway at Blue Heron
Theater. Since then the play had a historic 2006 production at the Stratford Festival (the first play directed by a Black woman, the first play written by a Black Canadian writer and the first play to have an all-Black cast at the festival) and has had
many high-profile productions across North America.
Cast: 3 women, 2 men
What people say:
"…undeniable emotional
power." — New York Times
"Harlem Duet,
by Djanet Sears, is a play about jealousy
multiplied by racial tensions that ventures boldly beyond the
personal into the political in a complex, lyrical flow of words. It's
of those rare works wherein we get swept away by the sheer virtuosity
of the writing. Yet for all its poetry and musicality, Harlem
Duet transcends mere word craft. The dramatic potential
is explosive." — The Montreal Gazette
"…an ambitiously complex
and satisfying work about interracial marriage, ghettos and the
whitening of Black history and culture…" — Variety.
"This is an impressive
achievement, an ambitious and accomplished work with scope and the
vision to realize it, a drama filled with intelligence and
compassion, humor and anger, outrage and understanding." —
Toronto Star
About the Playwright:
Djanet Sears is a Canadian playwright, actor and director,
nationally recognized for her work in African-Canadian Theatre. An
award-winning playwright and director, she has several acting award
nominations to her credit for both stage and screen. She is the
recipient of the Stratford Festival's Timothy Findley Award, as well
as Canada's highest literary honour for dramatic writing, the
Governor General's Literary Award.
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