Sophia Walker as Black Mary and Monica Parks as Aunt Ester Tyler in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean.Emily Cooper/Shaw Festival
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- Title: Gem of the Ocean
- Written by: August Wilson
- Director: Philip Akin
- Actors: Monica Parks, David Alan Anderson, Jeremiah Sparks
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 9, 2022
- COVID-19 measures: No mask or vaccine requirements
Critic’s pick
Calling Gem of the Ocean a stunning night at the theatre seems insufficient; at moments, it’s more like an out-of-body experience.
Director Philip Akin’s poignant and poetic production of this 2003 drama by the late, great African-American playwright August Wilson at the Shaw Festival is truly transporting in one particular scene in the second act.
In it, a young Black man named Citizen enters into a ritual trance and embarks on a spiritual journey by paper boat to a city made of bones deep under the ocean – and somehow brings the audience along with him.
This is the type of magic that can only happen in the live theatre when imaginations fuse collectively, but rarely is the trick pulled off as effectively as it is here.
Set the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1904, Gem of the Ocean, in a realistic sense, takes place entirely in the parlour of a house occupied by an oracular matriarch named Aunt Ester (Monica Parks).
Aunt Ester is known as a “washer of souls” in the local Black community, sometimes claiming to be 285 years old. One day, Citizen (Nathanael Judah) shows up seeking her help, confessing that he has killed a man. But the exact nature of the crime weighing on his conscience only comes out slowly.
Though Gem of the Ocean takes place forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, few of the Black characters in the play feel free.
Citizen, his name reflecting a post-slavery optimism that Jim Crow would quickly peck away at, has escaped outright oppression in his home state of Alabama only to find himself in indentured servitude at a mill in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Solly Two Kings (David Alan Anderson), a regular visitor to Aunt Ester’s who restlessly roams the land with a walking stick, refuses to be free while others still are not. The older man escaped enslavement to Canada by the Underground Railway many years ago, only to immediately return to the United States to help others – and his mission still persists even after the law has ostensibly changed.
Then, there is Caesar (a mesmerizing Allan Louis), brother to another character, Black Mary, and a constable who has so sided with his oppressors that he claims he wishes slavery would be re-established; he’s trapped by fear even as he terrorizes others in his community.
These three characters all end up in confrontation at the climax of a plot that revolves around the unrest that follows the death of a mill worker who chooses to drown rather than be convicted of a crime he says he didn’t commit.
The Shaw Festival’s production of Gem of the Ocean is its Canadian premiere. Our audiences have really been missing out.Emily Cooper/Shaw Festival
That drowning may be highly symbolic of the Black people who died at sea in between Africa and the United States of America during the slave trade, but it doesn’t feel so in the telling. Wilson somehow manages to create characters who are specific and believable, and yet also exist as archetypes.
The dialogue he penned for Gem of the Ocean is rich, rhythmic and riveting. You could just listen to these characters talk for hours – even or especially Louis’s bombastic and slippery Caesar, whose whitewashing of his own path from scofflaw to enforcer of the law is full of delusion and self-deception. (The strong ensemble also includes Jeremiah Sparks, Sophia Walker and Jason Cadiux.)
But what lifts Wilson’s play up into a top tier of theatrical writing is that otherworld odyssey Citizen goes on in the second act without ever leaving Aunt Ester’s parlour – one assisted in this production by the hidden secrets of Camellia Koo’s set.
Subtract 285 from the year 1904 and you’ll note that Aunt Ester was born in 1619, the year in which the first enslaved Africans arrived in what would become the United States of America.
Long before The 1619 Project, the acclaimed and now politically controversial New York Times journalistic series that aimed to reframe American history “by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of the national narrative”, Wilson was doing the same in his dramatic canon.
Gem of the Ocean is the first (in terms of narrative chronology) of Wilson’s so-called Century Cycle, a set of ten plays he began in 1982 that chronicled the African-American experience of the 20th century decade by decade (the most famous ones, recently adapted into films, are Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom).
Ontario’s professional theatres have only staged a handful of Wilson’s cycle to date; indeed, the Shaw Festival’s production of Gem of the Ocean is its Canadian premiere. Our audiences have really been missing out.
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