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TORONTO - When we think of the many shades that separate black and white, most of us might be inclined to see variants of grey.
But playwright Dael Orlandersmith sees shades of brown and red and yellow instead -- that's yellow, as in "high yellow", a term once used in certain circles to describe a black person of very light skin tone.
And in Yellowman -- a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a work of breathtaking lyricism -- she shares that vision with the rest of the world -- including a Toronto audience, thanks to a production that opened Tuesday in the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs -- a co-production of Nightwood Theatre and Obsidian Theatre, and part of Nightwood's ongoing 4x4 Festival.
It's a vision drawn from smack in the middle of South Carolina Sea Islands, spiced to perfection with the exotic rhythms and cadences of the Gullah-Geechee people and baked to perfection under the selfsame hot Carolinian sun the playwright evokes in the play's opening monologue.
It's a world where most outsides would see only Black. But Orlandersmith loses no time in fine-tuning our eyes to the shades of Black that play such a pivotal role in a social hierarchy that has evolved amongst the descendants of the slaves brought to this part of America to work the cotton fields.
In that world it seems, Alma, Orlandersmith's narrator, is one of the luckier ones.
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The daughter of a dark-skinned woman and a lighter-skinned man, Alma's skin, for instance, is lighter than her mother's, an accident of birth which places her a little higher on the complex social scale that rules her life.
But if Alma is a bit of a winner in the genetic sweepstakes, it seems, Eugene has taken the top prize, emerging from the womb of his light-skinned mother, seemingly unmarked by the rich, deep skin tones carried in his father's genes.
Played out in memory, Yellowman tells the story of Alma -- played by Ordena -- and Eugene -- played by Dean Marshall -- in flashback, starting with their first meeting in grade school and following them through their sexual awakening into adulthood and a tragedy that is seemingly imprinted in their genes.
Because, at every turn, their story is shaded, even scarred by the colour of their skin as they find their way through a world where being light skin is both coveted and despised.
In voyaging into the heart of this blackness, Orlandersmith never flinches from the horror as she examines the entrails of an intra-racial prejudice.
But at the same time, she finds an almost lyrical beauty there, poetically underscoring the glory of a race of Juno-eque black women labouring in the fields.
Even while she confronts the absurdity of a father cutting himself off from his child merely because of the colour of that child's skin or the skin of the man she chooses to marry.
But finally, it is that very poetry that almost does this production in, for while each actor has occasional moments of grace -- Ordena, particularly lovely as the younger Alma, Marshall as the unsure young man discovering a larger world -- they fail, in the main, to grasp the cadences and the subtlety that elevates Orlandersmith's prose to poetic status.
And they get scant assistance from director Weyni Mengesha, who seems constantly more concerned with what is being said than with how it is being said, unaware that much of the power of the tale is to be found more in the latter than the former.
So she allows what should be a simple story to become weighted down with acting, wasting much of the expanse of Tamara Marie Kucheran's sprawling set and, for the most part, failing to capture the complex rhythms of daily life so perfectly reflected in Orlandersmith's writing.
And without those rhythms, Yellowman never really comes fully to life.