In Moonlight Schooner, now making its world premiere at Berkeley Street Theatre, Dora Award-winning playwright Kanika Ambrose and director Sabryn Rock use a startling shipwreck opening to launch us into an intense and deep meditation on identity, desire and dislocation. We come ashore with the main characters on the island of St. Kitts on May Day 1958. It’s the Windrush era, when post World-War II migration to England during 1948 and 1973 promised island men opportunity, but demanded great personal sacrifice. Tensions – between ambition and limitation, between energy and impact, and between hope for the future and costs of leaving home – begin to refract and reverberate immediately.
Ambrose began writing Moonlight Schooner after encountering Derek Walcott’s poetry during the pandemic. Drawing on his depictions of Caribbean sailors and curiosity about her own family history, she conceived of the play as the story of a night that honours Black men in their full and complicated humanity. The story begins with the group of sailors washing up on the island after a torrential storm. They are stranded: their ship is wrecked, and their futures are uncertain. The unexpected night that we witness is filled with rum, music, dancing, flirtation and transgression — powered by the slow-burn unraveling of hopes, loyalties and personal codes.
A magnetic Jamie Robinson anchors the production as poet-sailor Shabine, whose lighter skin and education mark him as different from the rest. Pensive and powerfully articulate, he is uneasy with the reckless freedom around him, driven by obligations to his absent family, and increasingly aware of how the sweep of history forces his hand in every choice he makes. With him are brash, outspoken and unrestrained sailor Timothy (Daren A. Herbert); young and impressionable newcomer Vincy (danjelani ellis); and pliable local man Lyle (Tony Ofori), whose home the sailors take refuge in.
Lyle’s mother Janine (Nehassaiu deGannes) lends them shelter, setting the stage for uneasy hospitality. As the men revel, a young woman — pivotal to the play’s second half — becomes the object of their attention and desire. Her presence and the men’s reactions to her form a dark turning point. The night, already fragile beneath its gaiety, collapses under the weight of jealousy, guilt and unspoken codes: through monologues and flashbacks, including glimpses of Shabine’s family back home, the play examines how colonial legacies, colourism and the lure of migration to England distort and fracture lives.
One of the production’s strengths lies in its understated but evocative design. Set designer Shannon Lea Doyle deploys a spare, sculptural stage with two curved wooden structures flanking the playing space, referencing both ship and land. With minimal furniture, and ropes occasionally raised as masts or lowered as domestic boundaries, the design shifts fluidly between ship deck, house interior, tavern, clothing store, and open road. A teal curtain hung at the back evokes the sea, while the round frame overhead—reminiscent of a ship’s porthole or the moon—opens a poetic window onto the world beyond the stage. Lighting designer Raha Javanfar deepens this visual world with a palette of sea-blue hues, golden pools and stark spotlights that suggest sunlight, moonlight, storm – and emotional collapse. And sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne situates us in the ocean before the play even begins … with waves and wind folding into thunder, nightlife murmurs and the hum of distant revelry. This economical yet flexible design keeps the focus on the characters, while giving the play an immersive sensibility — a kind of maritime limbo, equidistant between safety and precarity. Design and dialogue work in concert to establish that this is as much an existential shipwreck for these men as an actual one.
The play and cast do a wonderful job realizing the complexity and diversity of these men, but at the same time, the depiction of women is deliberately unsettling. Except for Janine, all the female characters are played in drag by the male actors, often with stylized gestures and heightened mannerisms. The women are less characters in their own right than projections or embodiments of how the sailors remember, desire – or misunderstand – them. Likewise, the young woman who becomes a source of conflict among the men never appears onstage at all. She is discussed extensively: lusted after, objectified, blamed or pitied by the men, and even interacted with directly by Janine, but she is denied an actual stage presence and voice. All that we see is what they project onto her – a disturbing extension of the play’s interrogation of visibility and agency.
As the sole woman to appear on stage, Janine is brought to a startling and vivid life. Anglicized in dress and manner, she enters to a rendition of “God Save the Queen,” and speaks proudly of the land and comforts that her family enjoys, thanks to the money her husband sends from England, where he toils. Her presence crystallizes the play’s examination of imperial aspiration — and how the promise of upward mobility is entwined with dependency, separation and self-reinvention, coupled with wilful exclusion.
Herbert, ellis, Ofori and deGannes form a cohesive and versatile ensemble, with their shifts between characters underscoring the fluid, memory-driven structure of the play. When the men become women, children, a calypso duo, lovers or husbands, the doubling can feel distancing – but it also underscores the play’s themes of projection and identity.
As we take this voyage, the question we’re left to ponder is just where this Moonlight Schooner ultimately conveys us. It offers us a charged and unsettled portrait of Black men shaped by longing, circumstance and colonial legacies. And like Amrose’s other new play The Christmas Market, which is running concurrently at Crow’s Theatre, Moonlight Schooner delivers it through a rich verbal immersion, which demands our careful attention to the sometimes coarse, sometimes lyrical, consistently rapid dialogue (dialect coach Peter N. Bailey ensures precision in the accents).
Layer in time jumps, perspective shifts, projections and politics – plus the presence and possibilities of the inscrutable ocean backdrop – and the value proposition is clear. A rich, layered and mythic passage awaits our boarding … and promises plenty to unpack at journey’s end.
Necessary Angel’s Moonlight Schooner produced in association with Canadian Stage and Tarragon Theatre, runs until December 14, 2025 at the Berkeley Street Theatre. Production information and tickets are available at necessaryangel.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
