“shaniqua in abstraction”? More. Many. Magnificent.

If you’re considering a trip to Crow’s Theatre for bahia watson’s new one-woman show shaniqua in abstraction, don’t let the 90-minute run time lull you into expecting a neat, tidy and compact experience.  The show – which is raw, jagged, poetic, funny and touching – hits like a freight train, splitting open your head to pour in images, insights, absurdities and outrage, then sends you reeling into the night. 

Abstraction is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something, in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics or general rules. watson’s shaniqua in abstraction is a series of rapid-fire and tonally-varied skits that extract, explore – and explode — the “essential characteristics” of a Black woman. 

The show opens with a casting call where an off-stage voice repeatedly asks watson to deliver a line (actually, just the single word “Girl”) with different inflections and movements that boil down to delivering it “more Black”. Or rather, more abstraction of Black. watson as shaniqua goes with the direction, and it’s really funny. It’s also not funny. And this is just the start. 

Mid-audition, she muses about how full our minds are with ourselves, how little room there is for others, and so how we pick out details in alignment with our assumptions and interests. She would like to climb into others’ minds to know how they really see her. As I experience shaniqua in abstraction, this is the service that she performs for us in the swift, searing, identity-hopping travelogue which ensues.

shaniqua moves kinetically in and out of roles, time periods, and “essential characteristics”. She is a Black woman working in a white office, where every action and reaction is inflected and interpreted for her – and where a well-meaning focus on diversity and inclusion translates into more self-policing and more need to coddle her co-workers’ sensitivities. She is a slave, subject to beatings and sexual predation. She is an edgy, increasingly squirm-inducing standup comedian, a trash talk show host, an advertiser hawking ethnic ambiguity – and, in one of the most moving segments, she is an incarcerated inmate in group therapy. 

Directed by Sabryn Rock, these 90 minutes have an intensity, an intellectual density, and a fast pace that expand them, tesseract-like, into a multi-dimensional exploration of Black female identity covering hundreds of years. Through these personas, watson delivers deft, direct and impactful elucidations of concepts like white fragility, privilege and cultural appropriation, the reality and nuances of shadeism, the role of blackface, and the reason why some Black men reject Black women. 

This full-body, full-spirit, full-soul exploration of Black womanhood takes place through an accordion-like back-and-forth: between abstracted ideas of female Blackness, and specific details that elucidate what the reality behind them – lived or imagined — looks, sounds and feels like. watson’s versatility as a writer and actor is a living refutation of abstraction as essentialism. Shaniqua is at once all of these things, none . . . and so much more.

Echo Zhou’s simple set design, Kimbery Purtell’s focused lighting, and Thomas Ryder Payne’s crisp sound channel our focus to watson’s fluorescent virtuosity, as she plays (in her orange tracksuit) against a backdrop of Laura Warren’s title and image projections that are at moments super-specific . . . and at others more abstracted. 

This dense and intense show begs to be seen more than once. It packs tightly into a single virtuosic performance, dizzyingly diverse situations, searching insights, and rich veins of waggish humour – peppered with a number of allusions and references that I saw flying in real time right over my white male head.  

This is an absolutely dynamite show – if not necessarily a simple experience for white audiences (to which constituency I belong). The show Advisory cautions about the presence of “real talk” — and to elaborate what this means, waggishly slips in “depictions of whiteness”’ in between “swear words” and “slurs”. 

That’s true and important, but there is much, much more here to reckon with – and to recommend the show. 

There is shock and awe and blistering humour in watson’s performance. And there is rich, nuanced reasoning, philosophizing and feeling. 

And all of these are happening simultaneously, in real time, with an intensity and speed that make it hard to hold one insight or idea in your head . . . because the next one almost immediately explodes, expands or supplants it.  

More. Many. Magnificent.

shaniqua in abstraction, a Crow’s Theatre Production in association with paul watson productions and Obsidian Theatre Company, runs until April 28, 2024. Reserve tickets at CrowsTheatre.com.

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2024