Theatre 2022: Crow's Theatre - Red Velvet

 Crow’s Theatre is located in the east end of Toronto, at Carlaw St.and Dundas St. East, far away from the downtown theatre district that is dominated by Mirvish-owned theatres.  Crow’s Theatre seems to specialize in avant-garde productions, often with very innovative staging set up in its two performance spaces. In 2019, when we watched The Flick about ushers in a movie cinema, we walked into Crow’s main space to find stadium seating where the stage would normally be, mirroring the stadium seating that represented our seats for the show.  In 2020 when we watched Julius Caesar (just before everything shut down for the pandemic), we were in that same theatre but sat in stadium seating in the round while the action took place at floor level.  We watched Red Velvet, as the final production of 2022 and found a traditional stage setup. We plan to watch two other shows next year and are interested to find out how they will be presented.

The play Red Velvet is based on real-life events that led a black man to take on the titular role in Shakespeare’s Othello at London’s prestigious Theatre Royal, Covent Gardens in 1833. The part of the Moorish military commander was originally played, in blackface, by British actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833), considered the most famous stage actor of the time.  Kean was starring in the play alongside his son Charles, who was cast as his duplicitous advisor and nemesis Iago.  When Edmund suddenly fell collapsed on stage during a performance and died shortly after, Theatre Royal’s manager Pierre Laporte controversially hired African American thespian and noted Shakespearean actor Ira Aldrige (1807-1867) as Kean’s replacement.

Aldridge started acting at age 15 in New York City but since black actors were not well-received in the United States, he moved to England.  He played Othello in a small London Theatre when he was 17, becoming the first black actor to take on the role. He was also an abolitionist who often spoke out against slavery. Aldrige continued to star in abolitionist dramas as well as Shakespearean plays across Europe.  By the time of his death in 1867 in Lodz, Poland, Ira had become an acclaimed and award-winning stage actor who acted alongside white actresses, despite facing racism throughout his career. Both Edmund and Charles had met Aldridge and supported his career, prior to Aldrige filling in as Othello following Edmund’s passing.  Unfortunately, the British press were not as generous and Ira only lasted for two performances before the show was canceled, receiving undeservedly scathing and racist reviews. 

Not many details have been documented about this brief period when Aldrige stepped in as Othello at Covent Gardens. Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s work Red Velvet takes the basic facts and re-imagines what might have happened during this time. In her play, Aldridge joins an all-white cast who regard him with varying degrees of unease, fear, and even racist hate. Using dramatic license to add conflict to the situation, Edmund Kean is merely ill, not dead, Charles Kean now plays Cassius instead of Iago, and his fiancé Ellen Tree has the role of Desdemona. Charles assumed that he would take over the role of Othello and is appalled and aghast that it was assigned to a black man instead!  In real life, Charles and Ellen Tree did act together and eventually married but there is no indication that she was in the play with Ira.

Ira Aldridge comes across as a confident, talented actor who espouses realism in his style of acting. In a scene where Othello confronts Desdemona about her supposed affair with Cassius, Aldrige roughly manhandles Ellen (with her permission).  Having a black man touch a white woman in this way, even if it is just acting, is not well received. The reviews by the British Press are damning and lead to Aldridge’s termination after a bitter argument with Laporte, who had championed Ira’s hiring in the first place. It is strongly implied that Pierre Laporte is a closeted homosexual and there is a distinct homoerotic feel to the interactions between the two men.  I’m not sure if this was also added in for dramatic purposes, as nothing that I have read supports this.  In their argument leading to Aldridge’s firing, Laporte hints at his own burdens in overcoming the stigma of his sexuality in order to succeed in his field.

One interesting character is the black servant Connie, whose job it is to serve tea to the actors. Although she is prominently positioned at the back but smack-dab in the centre of the stage, she does not speak through most of the show.  Connie silently fulfills her duty as tea-lady, but visibly reacts to discussions about slavery and abolition, and the overt bigotry shown to Ira by some of the other cast members. Even the more liberal characters who claim to support the end of slavery basically treat her as a slave who is at their beck and call.  Her reactions are magnified as she listens to the horribly racist theatre reviews that are read aloud by the cast, and she doggedly tries to protect Ira and hide the newspapers from him when he demands to see them.

The events of 1833 in Covent Gardens are told in flashback and are bookmarked by scenes of an aged Aldrige in Poland, 1867, just prior to his death. He is getting ready to play King Lear and it is ironic that he is shown putting on white makeup and white gloves to hide his dark skin, doing the opposite of what Kean did to play Othello.  The show starts off with two characters speaking German(?) for several minutes before Aldrige appears and we learn that the woman is a female reporter who has barged her way into his dressing room in hopes of an interview.  The misogyny that she deals with in trying to gain respect from her male colleagues is set up as a parallel to the racism that Aldridge has endured.  In answering her questions, Ira reminisces about the events of Covent Garden, setting the crux of the play into motion.

This was an interesting and enjoyable play that taught us about an important time in theatrical history, while addressing racism, homophobia and misogyny.  That is quite the accomplishment for one evening of entertainment.