sistahs review in Now Magazine 1994

Dynamically diverse company spices up cultural stew
- By Jon Kaplan

SISTAHS, by maxine bailey and Sharon M. Lewis, directed by Lewis, with Carol Anderson, Melanie Nicholls-King, Lisa Richardson, Kim Roberts and Shakura S'aida. Presented by Sugar 'n' Spice Productions at the Poor Alex Theatre.

The act - and sometimes the art - of dining defines community. Breaking bread establishes a group, bringing people together to share and essential physical and, at some level, spiritual celebration of humanity and its need to come together.

But eating is only half of the equation, one part of a diptych painting hinged with its companion piece, the act - and art - of preparing the meal. If the importance of a food preparation is undervalued, one reason might be the fact that it's done my women's hands.

Sistahs, a new play by maxine bailey and Sharon M. Lewis, aims to give kitchen work its due.

The play brings together five powerful women for the communal preparation of a meal, but the situation in this Toronto home is a charged one. Sandra, the organizer, has cancer and is concerned about setting up a supportive family to care for her teenage daughter Assata. This nontraditional family includes her lover Dehlia, her half-sister Rea and her friend Cerise.

The two authors - each debuting as a playwright - recognize that Sistahs speaks to a wide reality. Though all five characters can be called black, they each come from a different culture - Jamaican, Trinidadian, African Canadian, East Asian and combinations in between.

The coming together of the five characters parallels the creation of the soup that's the focus of their meeting - seasoned by various viewpoints, backgrounds and memories, the result is a flavourful, tantalizing and filling meal.

Just as importantly, the show marks the full-fledged premiere of Sugar 'n' Spice Productions, an artist-initiated company that aims to produce art by and for women of colour - but art that speaks, because of its emotional truths, to a wider audience.

There have been all too few such efforts on the Toronto theatre scene. Local artists have mounted productions of black American writer Ntozake Shange's for coloured girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Canadian writer Djanet Sears (Afrika Solo), ahdri zhina mandiela (dark diaspora in dub) and Diana Braith-waite (The Wonder Quartet) have also - sometimes in collaboration with established companies - presented their own work.

Sugar 'n' Spice began less than two years ago, when Lewis was asked to direct a group of black women in a play the women finally deemed inappropriate, in part because the script was written by an African American and didn't speak to Caribbean-Canadian reality. Lewis had asked longtime friend bailey to produce the show, and when the project fell apart, the pair decided to write their own script. "That's where maxine's lack of theatre background came in," remembers the more theatrically experienced Lewis with a laugh. "She kept saying it would be easy - if that other woman could write a play, so could we. There were times later on when I made her stick to her convictions, especially at three in the morning when she wanted to quit."

"I've often thought of a company like Sugar 'n' Spice," adds bailey, "because there's so little opportunity for women of colour in the theatre. So often I leave a play disappointed, because it's not my story, no my voice."

The company's title emerged as an ironic reaction to those people who told the pair that the idea of a group of women initiating such a project was just "so cute." The women picked up on the nursery rhyme of girls being made of sugar and spice and everything nice - but then gave it and ironic twist.

"There is a desperate need for such an avenue for women of colour, but the unsettling reaction that we might just be a group wanting to play at something - like having a tea party - resonated angrily in my mind." recalls Lewis.

Slavery link
"When you're working with a group of Caribbean women, the resonance of sugar and spice goes beyond thoughts of sweet and sour. Sugar was always connected with slavery, trade and the labour involved in harvesting sugar cane on a plantation."

The group's title conjures up slightly different thing for bailey, with her Bajan (Barbadian) background, and Lewis, whose roots are Jamaican Trinidadian and East Indian. " Tough we're both from an island culture, there are touches of difference," offers bailey, peeling a clementine and sending up an aroma of citrus that complements her talk of food. "We grew up on the same soups, but in my home they were flavoured with thyme, bonnet pepper and watercress, while in Sharon's the spices were masala, curry and coriander. Language, music and food are key means of carrying culture."

The richness of this food was matched by that of last fall's workshop of the show, in which the play's first act had a short public run. My central memory of that event is the emotional warmth and strength generated between the women on stage. "I'll never forget the support and appreciation of the audience at the first performance, even before the first line was spoken, simply because five black women were on the stage," says Lewis, who performed in the workshop.

"The biggest compliment we heard was that people were absolutely engaged in the story, a fact reaffirmed by the questionnaires we gave viewers," recalls bailey. "We asked people to write down three words that summed up their experience of the show, and the two that came up most frequently were 'me' and 'us.'"

While the food prepared by the characters draws on a number of cultures, the play itself uses several presentational styles. In fact, it has three time frames - the present, which uses sequential western narrative techniques, ancestral time, with its slow, repetitive movements and lecture mode, flashbacks to Sandra's university lectures on blacks and slavery.

Lecture scenes
" Ancestral time connects the present with the past and the future," offers Lewis. "At the start of the play, Sandra and Assata are cleaning their house before the others arrive. It isn't a matter of just cleaning, but rather of wiping the negative out of the house - there's a ritualistic fell of preparing to remove this family of five women out of time and space, out of their specific reality."

"The lectures speak to another side of Sandra." Suggests bailey. "For me, that side is the North American side of the Trinidadian-born Sandra. We don't see her at home as a historian at a white university, but we get glimpses in the lecture scenes of her passion about what slavery has done to us and where it has left us."

"I love the connection between lecturing and the Caribbean oral storytelling tradition," continues Lewis. "Sandra could exist 100 years ago, talking about slavery in the same animated fashion, as if she were telling a story to a younger generation. "That's how I know about my history - I heard it listening to my grandmother in our kitchen in Trinidad. I also know the history I learned at the U of T. I see the histories running parallel rather than in conflict - schools and grandmothers support each other." The women have written seven drafts of Sistahs since they began working on it 19 months ago. At first they felt the responsibility to tell the whole black experience. Now they've become comfortable dealing with one extended family and its own small but vibrant world - one that embraces differences as well as similarities.

When bailey came up with the title, in fact, Lewis didn't immediately accept its varied meanings. "We went through an exercise discussing what we each thought the play to be about," says bailey with a knowing smile. "For me, it's about acceptance, that I could create my own family, one not necessarily based on blood ties. Sharon is my sister - I trust her with my child. That's what family is about."

"And I thought of a sister as a member of my blood family, with further political ramifications about empowerment for blacks through acknowledgment of rights and a past," admits Lewis. "I came to understand the importance of the play's title only when I realized the importance of choosing my own sisters."

sistahs: a full length dramatic play