Harlem Duet

Harlem Duet evokes and responds to a much older play: William Shakespeare’s 1603 tragedy Othello, one of the earliest representations of a Black character in European theater. Playwright Djanet Sears makes the relationship between her play and Shakespeare’s explicit through character names and visual motifs: The play’s male protagonist shares a name with the titular protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy, while white women throughout the play have names derived from that of Shakespeare’s Desdemona—Othello’s wife.

In each of the play’s three timelines, a white handkerchief plays a key role. These handkerchiefs recall the white handkerchief that leads Othello to suspect Desdemona of infidelity in Othello, thus sparking the tragic events of Shakespeare’s play.

In most performances of Othello before the mid-20th century, Othello was played by a white man who applied makeup to his face to appear Black. This tradition of blackface is echoed and ironized in Harlem Duet, as He—a Black actor who aspires to play Othello and other Shakespearean roles—applies black greasepaint to his face before performing in a minstrel show. In his book A Way of Being Free—published in the same year in which Harlem Duet’s present action is set—The Nigerian poet Ben Okri describes the character of Othello as embodying white people’s ideas of Black people. As such, he says:

The black person’s response to Othello is more secret, and much more anguished, than can be imagined. It makes you unbearably lonely to know that you can empathise with [white people], but they will rarely empathise with you. It hurts to watch Othello. (Honigmann, E. A. J.; Thompson, Ayanna, eds. Othello. The Arden Shakespeare. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).

Harlem Duet can be understood as a dramatization of this secret and anguished response to Othello and, by extension, to all the harmful representations of Black life perpetuated by white-dominated media. The play suggests that representations of Black people in the present day remain as heavily informed by white myths as they were in Shakespeare’s time and that these false representations have profound effects on the lives and psyches of real Black people.