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Creating value where we
live and work. Together.
Applauding
Centaur Theatre Company.
At Great-West Life, London Life and Canada Life, we are committed to enriching communities through our support
of the arts. We focus on accessibility and audience development, and encourage the participation and education of
youth. We’re proud to support Theatre of Tomorrow through the Centaur Theatre Company as they engage minds
entertain audiences and encourage new ideas.
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Play Synopsis
Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God is a journey into questions about loss, God, and the struggle &
strength of the black community. Adventures takes the audience into the evolving African Diaspora
(communities throughout the world descended from those who left or were taken from Africa), locating it
in a specifically modern, Canadian context within the historic town of Negro Creek in Ontario, near
Owen Sound.
The protagonist is Rainey Baldwin Johnson, a black female physician struggling with the
untimely death of her daughter 3 years prior. Separated from her husband, Michael, a church pastor in a
Black congregation, and no longer practicing medicine, Rainey forms the tone of the play through her
seemingly endless pain surrounding a loss she cannot move beyond, underlining through personal
narrative the traumas continually experienced by black communities. But Rainey’s pain does not rest on
the surface; her breakdown propels an urgent need for answers and an understanding of a faith that has
left her behind.
While Rainey grieves without reprieve, Michael and his congregation organize against a white
municipal majority wishing to change Negro Creek Road (named so for the land, “Negro Creek,” given
to black Canadian soldiers) to Moggie Road (the name of a white settler). Rainey’s elderly father, Judge
Abendigo Johnson, forms another counter point as he leads a coalition of black senior citizens in the
“liberation” of black dolls, statues, and lawn ornaments that were made to represent black slaves in
undignified and often still-unchallenged ways (think Aunt Jemima maple syrup and ceramic black stable
boys with painted-on toothy grins). As Abendigo’s health begins to fail, everyone--Rainey, Michael, and
the entire Negro Creek community--is drawn into a fulcrum of past, present, and future reckoning and
recuperation.
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Playwright Biography: Djanet Sears
Djanet Sears is an awardwinning playwright and
director and has several acting
nominations to her credit for
both stage and screen. She is the
recipient of the Stratford
Festival’s 2004 Timothy Findley
Award, as well as Canada’s
highest literary honour for
dramatic writing: the 1998
Governor General’s Literary Award. She is the playwright and director of the multiple
Dora Award winning production of Harlem Duet (Scirocco Drama, 1997). Her other
honours include: the 1998 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Martin Luther
King Jr. Achievement Award, and a Phenomenal Woman of the Arts Award. Her most
recent work for the stage, The Adventures Of A Black Girl In Search Of God, (Playwrights
Canada Press, 2003), shortlisted for a 2004 Trillium Book Award and enjoyed a six
month run in 2003/2004, as part of the Mirvish Productions Season. Her other plays
include Afrika Solo, Who Killed Katie Ross and Double Trouble. Djanet is the driving force
behind the AfriCanadian Playwrights’ Festival, and a founding member of the Obsidian
Theatre Company. She is also the editor of Testifyin': Contemporary African Canadian
Drama, Vols. I & II, the first anthologies of plays by playwrights of African descent in
Canada (Playwrights Canada Press, 2000 & 2003). She is currently an adjunct professor
at University College, University of Toronto
(http://dramacentre.utoronto.ca/?page_id=430).
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Topics & Themes
Black Radical Tradition
Black Canadian History and Struggle
Theology of Suffering
Liberation Theology
Whiteness (as system)
The role of God and the Church in the Black
community
Tactics for overthrowing White Supremacy
Systemic Racism
Black Canadians in War
Resistance
Life-Tactics
African Diaspora
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Cast of Characters
Rainey Baldwin Johnson
Michael Baldwin
Abendigo Johnson
Ivy
Bert
Darese
Girlene
Paramedic
Doctor Radcliffe
Delivery Man
“Many of us have been participants in, or witness to
catastrophic life-changing events where the presence of
God or even the faintest hint of grace could not be located.
Where was God last year when Mr. Byrd was dragged by a
chain from the back of a pick-up truck, by a trio of White
supremacists, until one by one his limbs fell by the
roadside. They say he was conscious for much of it”
(Djanet Sears, from the introduction, iii).
Guard
Chorus of Ancestors
Terms
Santeria - A religion from the Caribbean, and of West African extraction, that blends Roman
Catholicism with its local indigenous religious practices. Michael calls Santeria a system “of African
cultural self-assertion and preservation” (24).
Vodun - A West African religious tradition form Ghana, Benin, and Togo. The main source for the
traditional religions of the African Diaspora, such as Voodoo. Centered around the divine elemental
spirits of the earth and the means and methods by which they govern the emergence of both human and
non-human life. Rainey: “There’s something about those African religions. Something about an
understanding of the extraordinary forces of nature. She giveth and she taketh away” (24).
Black Radical Tradition - The Black Radical Tradition names the black individuals and black
movements that resisted and continue to resist systemic racism. The tradition generally names a mixture
of intellectuality and embodied activism that was particular to the histories, stories, and myths of the
black community. Starting in the late 1800s/early 1900s with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Franz
Fanon, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B Dubois, the Black Radical Tradition was revived in the 1950-60s with
the Black Panthers in Detroit (1966–today), Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely
Carmichael, the theologian James Cone, and musicians and poets such as The Watts Prophets (1970s),
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Amiri Baraka, and Cecil Taylor. The Black Radical Tradition continues on today in what some are calling
a “second-wave civil rights movement” with organizations like Black Lives Matter in North America,
spreading their courage internationally as other minorities struggle for basic dignity in their everyday
lives (Blackfulla in Australia and Idle No More in Canada each attribute a portion of their beliefs and
strategies to the Black Radical Tradition).
Oral Storytelling Tradition - Before there was writing, there was story. Before the written word,
every culture told stories out loud to the gathered community in order to impress, again and again, a
map tracing the routes their community had taken from the past to the present, and could take into the
future. The West African oral tradition, which Sears invokes and leans on, characteristically includes an
embodied performativity (they move and sing when they tell their stories).
Did you know?
The “Baldwin” name (Both Michael and Rainey carry Baldwin as part of their surname): Baldwin is
a significant name in the history of recent black social theory. It refers primarily to James Baldwin, an
explosive and penetrating 20th century American black intellectual whose work continues to fruitfully
analyze Whiteness and its effect on black life in America. Baldwin famously wrote Go Tell It On The
Mountain (1953), among many others. Here are a few notable quotes written by Baldwin in the 50s and
60s: in the height of the civil rights movement.
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“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they
do not know about themselves” (The Fire Next Time, 1963).
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“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once
hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain” ("Me and My House" in Harper's (1955);
republished in Notes of a Native Son, 1955).
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Note: This quote encapsulates the art of Baldwin’s analysis of whiteness, overturning normal modes of
racial understanding through emotive and existential appeal. “I do not know many Negroes who are
eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply
don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this
planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves
and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very
well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed." (Letter
from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the
Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time, 1963).
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Juma Moore: From Rainey’s first extended monologue: “My Pa’s family lived and died on this bush
land – been ours since the war of 1812. [. . .] My great grandmother 130 gave her life to this water trying
to save a soldier’s uniform. Lorraine Johnson. I was named for her” (19). Rainey continues: “Her
[Lorraine’s] grandfather Juma, Juma Moore was granted this Ojibway territory for fighting against the
Americans in the Coloured Militia. Once a year his uniform would get a ritual cleaning” (19).
James Byrd Jr.: “In the pre-dawn hours of June 7, 1998, Byrd [an African-American man] was walking
home in Jasper, Texas, when he was stopped by three white men who offered him a ride home. Byrd got
in the bed of their pick-up truck, but the men did not take him home. Instead, they drove him to a
desolate, wooded road east of town, beat him severely, chained him to the back of the truck by his ankles
and dragged him for more than three miles. The murderers drove on for another mile before dumping his
torso in front of an African-American cemetery in Jasper. Byrd's lynching-by-dragging gave impetus to
passage of a Texas hate crimes law.”
- The Anti-Defamation League
http://www.adl.org/imagine/james-byrd-jr.html?referrer=https://www.google.ca/
A note on language: The N-word is used in Sears’ play, which is acceptable because she is an AfroCanadian woman. In black American and Canadian communities, the word has a number of important
uses and references. In this study guide I will not use or quote the word because I am not black. Likewise
in your discussions, do not use the N-word if you are not black. This is not in order to be politically
correct, to satisfy some trend. It is to pay respect to the fact that black people use the word in ways that
white people traditionally have not. There is a horrific history of non-black people (mainly white people)
using the N-word in only derogatory ways. You should note the N-word doesn’t entirely implicate
“Negro” nor is it entirely separate – in specifying “Negro Creek.” The use of these words do call for
discussion, including if the issue of reclaiming a word is allowed in this case (and if so, by whom?).
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Study Questions
1. Where does this play bring you in your consideration of your racial/cultural/social identity? Do you
feel confused by the urgency that Abendigo and his Lotsa Soap Cleaning Company feel as they
conspire to liberate statues of black subjugation? How do you identify with their desires and actions,
and in what ways do you not? How does such relief or confusion relate for you to your identification
as white, black, brown, trans, queer, a majority, or a minority?
2. One does not often hear about “Canadian black identity.” What does this say about the picture of
‘Canadian life’ we are given through our education system and the media we consume? How does
Adventures of a Black Girl challenge this picture of Canada?
3. Rainey begins the play by eulogizing her dead daughter. After Rainey first begins to eat earth in front
of the audience, she says, “It started when Janie was still inside me ... Me secretly binging on freezer
frost” (19). Then later, “I’ve been trying to get out of here all my life and now, now I just hunger for the
soft sugary earth by Negro creek” (19). What kind of symbology is being activated here? What does
eating earth have to do with the connections between personal and communal suffering and
geographic location? How do they connect to the African oral tradition Sears is invoking?
4. Djanet Sears utilizes a living architecture of bodies for her set. This is drawn from the West African
storytelling traditions. What effects does this technique produce, especially in contrast with the
traditional Western theatre approach of building sets that imitate the everyday as realistically as
possible? Do you think this dramatic choice alters the frame in which the audience encounters the lives
of Sears’ characters? How?
5. God plays an interesting role in this play. How would you characterize the God or gods as they are
expressed through the characters’ speaking, actions, and conflicts? Who is God in this play? Or rather,
who is God to Rainey? Who is God to Michael? Who is God to Abendigo? Make a list of
characteristics.
6. Consider the importance of the military uniform of Juma Moore, the 19th century black soldier, the
ultimate goal for the Lotsa Soap Cleaning Company. How is the uniform tied to their project of
liberating artifacts that have been made into “seditious artifacts”? How is it tied to Rainey’s loss of her
daughter and Michael’s struggle to keep the name of Negro Creek? What does the uniform (or the act
of stealing it) represent that it would be the ultimate goal?
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7. Consider the politics of naming, invoked in Sears’ play. A white constituency feels the name Negro
Creek Road is not politically correct, but they want to change it to Moggie Road, the name of a white
settler. How is it possible that one community’s perhaps well-meaning politically correct choice could
be experienced by another community as violent, oppressive, and blind? How does political
correctness function in your everyday life? Is this a good thing or a bad thing (or somewhere in
between)? Who gets to name and why?
8. The title of Michael’s thesis, “Deliverance: The church as a fundamental vehicle for covert resistance
from slavery to the civil rights movement,” names one of the traditions that Sears wants to invoke in
her narrative on black suffering and hope. Black church life in North America has historically been a
gathering place of both radical politics and devout religion. When the black community was refused
entry into the electoral process, and when it was illegal in the south to be black and free, the church
became a haven for intelligent and urgent black resistance. How do Michael’s actions explore and
develop these covert resistances of the black church? How is his approach to resistance different from
Abendigo’s?
Discussion Questions
1. Are you aware of the current massive movements for black liberation in the United States (as well as
in Canada and elsewhere)? The Black Lives Matter movement, among others, is currently and urgently
forcing a transnational reckoning with the fact that white supremacy not only still exists, but still
oppresses much of life for black people in supposedly civilized countries. How do you connect the
themes in Sears’ play with these modern movements for liberation?
2. What is drama’s role in social change? When we watch Abendigo liberate the military uniform of the
black soldier, are we spurred on to seek similar change and restitution? Or are we, as Augusto Boal
suggests, simply allowing the narrative relief of Abendigo’s success cleanse us from any real-world
involvement? In the ensuing discussion, try to make the distinction between the “feelings” and
“actions” produced by different dramatic productions.
3. Consider the current Canadian epidemic of missing and murdered First Nations women like Cherisse
Houle, Constance Cameron, or Helen Betty Osborne. How does Canada’s social response or lack of
response to its own glaring systemic racism compare or contrast with the United States’ social
response to the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, the 9 black bible study attendees in Charleston,
and so many more over the last year? Do you find it easier to engage with social emergencies centered
in other societies? Why? By shining a light on black experience in Canada, does Sears’ play offer any
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strategies for closing this gap of engagement with the social emergency around First Nations
communities?
Research Questions
1. Watch the recent film on virtuosic musician Nina
Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone? (it is currently on
Canadian Netflix). Give a multimedia presentation in
class that compares and contrasts the psychoses of both
Rainey and Nina Simone in light of the structural
condition of racism. Consider the strategies and tactics
that emerge for both women as a result of this meeting
point between personal tragedy, communal oppression,
and virtuosic artistic skill. How might perspectives on
mental illness be re-conceived when the pressure of a
racist system is taken into account?
2. Listen to the Watts Prophets (Rappin’ Black in a White
World) from the 1970s as well to Kendrick Lamar’s
“Alright” from his 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly (both
can be accessed on Youtube). Write a 5-page paper
investigating the links between the lyrics of Lamar and
the Watts Prophets and the worldviews espoused by
Rainey, Michael, and Abendigo in Adventures of a Black
Girl. Do they weave a single tapestry? How do they
challenge common conceptions of North American
society as colour-blind or post-racial? If these three artistic works are all considered part of the oral
tradition of the African Diaspora, what “maps” to the future are suggested by their characters and lyrics?
NOTE: The Nina Simone film, and the music from the Watts Prophets and Kendrick Lamar all deal
directly with difficult issues that have faced and continue to face black communities. The rawness of the
art, its language and images, tackle mental illness, racism, police brutality, and White silence, and does so
without apology or censorship. While there is not better art on these issues that is gentler, this note is to
make it clear that some may find aspects of their art disconcerting and disorienting (though this is
probably how Sears would like it).
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Classroom Activities
1. Social Distance exercise on “State-sanctioned violence against black, brown, and
indigenous North Americans.”
This is a useful exercise to understand through our bodies how people of different demographics experience the same
society in drastically different ways.
a. Designate a person to stand in the middle of the room. They are the “frame.”
b. Give the Frame a list of perspectives that they will speak aloud. These perspectives each represent
a prevalent conception of racism and race relations in North America.
i. “It’s a black problem.”
ii. “It’s a systemic problem.”
iii.
“It’s a police problem.”
iv.
“It’s a white problem.”
v. “It’s a First Nations problem.”
vi.
Other frames can be added.
c. The gathered individuals move their bodies to a location in relation to the Frame (centre) that
expresses the distance or closeness they feel to the issue when it is framed in the way just
vocalized.
i. For example, the Frame--standing in the middle--says, “it’s a black problem.” The individuals
move closer or farther from the Frame to the extent that they feel personally implicated in this
view of the issue of State sanctioned violence.
d. The Frame should feel free to ad-lib, improvising new frames that come to mind as the bodily
movement expresses the network of social distances we live each and every day.
e. After each frame is announced, and people have moved, stop and ask the group for short
reflections on why they moved where they did.
NOTE: When people are reflecting on their movements, there are no wrong answers. This is an exercise to
make visible the already existing cultural confusion around race in North America (especially in white
communities), and thus should make space for discomfort and unknowing.
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2. Speed Dating - an exercise to activate short bursts of conversation through thought
1. Number off as 1s and 2s.
2. 1s are “Posts,” 2s are “Flows.”
3. Posts find a spot and stay there.
4. A portion of the play is introduced (student or teacher can choose passages and create questions, or I
have included some selections below).
5. Flows move to the Post of their choice (1 Flow per Post)
6. Discussion happens for 5 minutes on a timer (timers on phones work great)
7. When timer sounds, Flows move counterclockwise to their next Post, and discuss for another 5
minutes.
8. Either the Post or Flow may choose to keep the thread of their conversation going throughout the
game, or they may choose to latch onto each new idea. Or a mix of the two. The point is to allow a
massive amount of thinking to happen simultaneously.
9. After 25 minutes, gather in a group and reflect:
a. What thoughts emerged?
b. What happened in the process that was interesting?
c. What do you now know about this group’s general reaction to Sears’ play?
Selections to be given to Posts
(One selection can be given to all Posts, or each Post may receive their own unique text)
1. “Where was God in Auschwitz half a century ago? Where was God when my great, great, great
grandmother Yaa was abducted from her tiny village on the coast of Ghana? Where was God during
the atrocities of slavery? Where was God recently, when my friend’s daughter and husband were
murdered? Where was God in Bopal, India? Where was God on September 11, 2001? Where was God?
And what keeps us going in the face of such utter desolation? In truth, I don’t know. I do, however,
experience the weight of my personal history at those times [of questioning the existence or nature of
God], and the struggle of those below me on the ‘tree’ to survive, to survive with dignity, keeps me
going. It helps to remind me that I must struggle to do the same – even at those times when I wish not
to” (Adventures of a Black Girl, iii-iv).
2. The preacher Michael Baldwin says, “Black people would be nowhere without the church. Reverend
Martin Luther King used the church in the tradition of African resistance in the Americas going all the
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way back to slavery” (30). How does this socio-political activation of “church life” compare to your
own experience or perception?
3. Abendigo, to the Black garden gnome he and the others have just liberated: “That’s right my little man,
a few scoops of stucco, a drop or two of enamel and you’ll never have to smile like that again” (34).
Why does Abendigo say this? Beginning in the 1960s, there has been a resurgence of black folks
wearing their hair naturally (instead of pomading it to look straight and ‘white’). What do black
garden gnomes being made to smile “like that” have to do with representations of black bodies in the
media, in white stereotypes, and in black communities (such as in wearing one’s hair heavily
conditioned to look ‘white’)?
4. Rainey: Pa, how is this going to change the world? This is not Detroit. We’re not in the sixties anymore.
The struggle is over. What you fought for back then worked, I’m a doctor, was a doctor. I have choices.
Things have changed. This is Canada. This is Cannan Land.
Abendigo: One flower does not a garden make (42-43).
What does Abendigo mean in his response to Rainey? Do you agree with him? How is your response
these questions conditioned by what you want to be true?
5. Rainey responds to finding out that Abendigo has been stealing/liberating “thoroughly seditious artifacts
symbolizing the oppression of African people” (43):
Rainey: I understand, Pa. I’ve told you about the times other doctors or patients assumed I was the
nurse. Some patients didn’t event want me to treat them. But that’s changing too.
Abendigo: There’s no use cutting down the weed and leaving the root.
Consider the possibility that some illegality (stealing, for example) might sometimes be a more lifeaffirming activity than the legal activity of not liberating those seditiously oppressive artifacts. In
Canada, where racism is still most certainly alive, what is the weed (that which you cut but comes back)
and what is the root (that which you pull up and does not return)? What policies? What beliefs?
6. Abendigo (to Rainey): NO, NO. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. TO TOLERATE AND TO ACCEPT ARE
TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. They want to take away this place. Just like they did Juma
Moore’s soldier’s jacket. And I won’t let them. Our blood is in this soil. Fifty of us, marching down
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Negro Creek Road, protesting the town council’s bid to change the name to Moggie Road. They
wanted to name it after some white settler who hadn’t lived in this community but a few years.
Something about the word “Negro” being politically incorrect. When in truth most white folks call this
N----- Creek.
What is the difference between tolerance and acceptance? In a racial context, who gets to say whether
tolerance or acceptance is being practiced? Consider First Nations communities in Canada and their
struggle for acceptance--rather than tolerance--for who they are (the descendants of Canada’s original
land owners whose land was stolen and people subjugated and killed). If a white person (or a person or
corporation representing white interests) says to a First Nations person, “I’m accepting you, you just
don’t realize it” and the First Nations persons says, “no, you’re only tolerating me, you just don’t realize
it,” whose perspective should be honored more?
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