By MAHIRA KAKKAR

"Don't they know? We order ourselves according to eternal dictates. And after all the squabbles we settle ourselves again like a newborn babe, into the comfort arms of yesterday."

Canadian playwright Florence Gibson (Photo courtesy of the National Post)

So says Lackey, one of the characters in Belle, the powerful play being given its American premiere by the fourth-year drama students at Juilliard. Written by Canadian playwright Florence Gibson (who describes the play as "a reconstruction of the Reconstruction era of the United States") Belle is, in essence, a poetic metaphor for a period of American history. The characters in the play scream, fight, shout, run, rally, march, and laugh unashamedly in their full-hearted protest against these "eternal dictates."

While Belle is about using, losing, and finding one's voice, the action proper revolves around two former slaves: Belle and her husband, Bowlyn. In the period following the Civil War, the two leave Georgia with their baby to go North. Bowlyn promises Belle: "I will bedeck your neck in diamonds. You will have parasols and cool drinks with their own smug umbrellas." These two characters' journeys become inextricably intertwined with those of Nance, a female suffrage worker, and Lackey, a young white man who sorely misses his life in the South. There is also Althea, Belle's older sister, who is described as "timeless."

We follow the trajectory of these characters as they try to find themselves and build lives of meaning in a shifting world. Bowlyn tries to define "the truth of his life." Nance says, "The war is over and all them rules are gone—we's making 'em up." Each is affected by living in a liminal stage of history—a time of betrayal, dreams, compromises, and contradictions. Politics, race, gender, and class seem to be the only constants. Belle is the most affected by these, as she suffers blow after blow in several forms. However, she alone does not succumb to external forces, because, as she tells Althea, "I don't give up."

The play is rooted in the actual past, but its language is unlike any other: lyrical, imaginative, and evocative of a completely different world. Gibson explains that she has drawn on several different experiences for her creation. "When I was a child, my father used to read to me from a comic strip by Walt Kelly (a political cartoonist in the McCarthy era) called Pogo, about swamp creatures from the Okefenokee swamp in Florida. They had a Southern way of talking that was highly embellished," says Gibson. The playwright was also a practicing doctor for a number of years and lived in Africa. She worked on the Kenya-Uganda border in maternal-child health clinics and observed how women were silenced in a polygamous society. "I also worked in Toronto in a women's reproductive-health clinic and saw that, although the city is very multicultural, there was a real black-white divide, and the political problems brought the clinic to its knees." Gibson started reading the work of Bell Hooks, whose Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism influenced her greatly, and also immersed herself in literature about the race for the vote as seen through the eyes of black men, black women, and white women. "This is really a play that has been percolating through me for the last 40 years," says Gibson, "and it is a political, personal, and feminist piece all at once, set at the crossroads of racism and sexism."

A costume sketch for the character Althea in Belle by Carrie Robbins.

Given the volatile nature of the play and its themes, it is fitting that an artist as respected as Tazewell Thompson should be directing it. Mr. Thompson's credits include plays at Juilliard and N.Y.U.; he believes it is part of his responsibility as a director to inspire young actors in the theater and excite them about the medium. His professional opera and stage work includes several world premieres. Observes Damali Scott, who plays Althea in Juilliard's production of Belle, "The marriage of the play with Tazewell is a perfect fit. It is truly a collaboration."

The director believes that the play is "gutsy and lavish in its language and themes. It explores themes of freedom and tolerance and the power of words to inspire, affect, and seduce—how words can change the course of a nation and cause laws to come into being. In this play, the word and the poetry of the word are closely aligned with who the characters are. It is almost Shakespearean."

Belle is indeed large in its scope and breadth; the characters all seem larger than life. Nance (played by Molly Stuart) is passionately committed to obtaining votes for women. The playwright based her on the Grimke sisters of the Abolitionist era. Nance goes to extremes to get what she wants, stopping at nothing and leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. Althea is a repository of rage for her entire race; with her roots in anger, she is unable to move forward. Her staying put in the world she knows while all the other characters move about is a physical representation of this. She is metaphorically still enslaved in the holds of the slave ships and is unable to find a way out. Bowlyn is intent on proving his manhood until he realizes he cannot live without Belle, and Lackey is the epitome of the rootless white Southern man after the Civil War. Belle alone remains grounded, strong, and true.

Gibson's inspiration for the title character came from a number of strong women, including Hooks and Sojourner Truth (whose slave name was Isabelle—or "Belle," for short—which she later gave up). Echoes of these women's words resonate throughout the piece; Belle utters Truth's famous statement, "I have ploughed a furrow straight as any man." The irony is that these fervent words are spoken while she is down on her hands and knees scrubbing a floor.

The play is brimful of rich contradictions like this, which make one wonder what it was like to be alive at this threshold time in the country's making. Bringing this period to life is a team of renowned designers. Costume designer Carrie Robbins says she is trying to uphold the integrity of the play: "The piece is poetic, and one has to filter and heighten reality to match the poetry of the text." The costumes, therefore—while built to feel like actual clothes—are made to achieve a similar level of abstraction as the scenery and used to emphasize class differences. The sets, designed by Donald Eastman, convey a theatrical world rather than a naturalistic one, and allow for quick shifts from country to city, street to house, and working-class spaces to those inhabited by the bourgeoisie. "The sets will also convey the feeling that people are operating under the weight of the system—that they are working on the other side of liberty," says Eastman.

Belle Drama Theater Saturday-Thursday, Dec. 13-18 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

The design team's efforts serve a play that is very actor-centric. "I chose this play because its language is rich, and because I felt that people at Juilliard could really carry it off," says Michael Kahn, who heads Juilliard's Drama Division and is keenly interested in portraying a body of work that reflects the diversity of the department. "I also like to do plays that are very good and that people haven't seen before," Kahn adds. Given its subject matter and rich language, the team's collaborative efforts and their credentials, and the powerful actors portraying the roles, the play promises to be more than merely good. It promises—like the lead character herself—"to ring like a clear bell in the night air."

Mahira Kakkar is a fourth-year drama student.