Dreamlike solo show tackles complex ideas

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This article was published 15/10/2021 (1761 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At this point in our culture, the words “I see dead people” may lead you to assume you’re in for a scary ride.

What’s fascinating about Samson Bonkeabantu Brown’s autobiographical solo play 11:11 is how un-scary it is. For the average theatregoer, certainly it is a work that may take you out of your comfort zone. But it does this in a delightful way, like a strange dream that feels like its own adventure.

That’s not a coincidence. Brown has plumbed his own dreamlife in telling his story, about a child visited by ancestors and pushed toward an understanding of a vague future purpose: “You are a child who will bridge the gap.”

The journey continues into an unsettled adolescence, in which Brown comes to terms with a sexual preference towards women, and yet refuses the label of lesbian: Born with the body of a girl, he knows he is a man.

But along the way, the Toronto artist must also come to terms with cultural contradictions. His ancestors include colonizers as well as the colonized. (His Portuguese grandfather figures prominently in his journey.) Ultimately, that journey will take him to South Africa, where he will gain a deeper understanding of his purpose.

Director Tsholo Khalema and set/costume designer Nalo Soyini Bruce approach the staging of complex ideas with disarming elegance, incorporating ritual, traditional dance and costume, and a dazzling set list of international music. At one point, the stage floor becomes a map of Africa, allowing Brown to deliver an eye-opening history lesson about a continent visualized by its European colonizers as an entity to be cut up like so much birthday cake.

You may recognize Brown: he achieved a degree of social media fame in 2019, just prior to completing his work on 11:11, when he participated in a Gillette commercial in which we see his supportive father teaching his transitioning son how to shave, a touching vignette that just hints at Brown’s deep reserves of charm.

This 71-minute show delivers them more amply: Brown’s claim to the title of “Sangoma” — a Zulu healer — does not seem to be an exaggeration, given his apparent sensitivity.

One might assume that this play is a product of this specific cultural moment, when Black rights and trans rights have hit a flashpoint in public consciousness.

Maybe so. But this show, produced and filmed at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, employs geo-political and personal history to pointedly portray how this seemingly current story has centuries worth of history behind it.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing