VENUS’ DAUGHTER by Meghan Swaby, directed by Philip Akin, with Swaby, Akosua Amo-Adem and Kaleb Alexander. Presented by Obsidian Theatre at the Theatre Centre (1115 Queen West). Previews February 14-17, opens February 18 and runs to February 28. Tuesday to Saturday 8 pm, matinees Saturday-Sunday 2 pm. $20-$35. 416-538-0998. See listing.
Ever seen actors with the power to change the chemical composition of a stage or screen? Their talent is so rich and natural that you believe every look, gesture and word.
Akosua Amo-Adem is one of them. You probably don’t know the name, but soon you will, and by then you’ll also know to pronounce her first name A-KOH-see-ah. She’s one of those gifted performers who makes you snap to attention. You can’t not watch her.
Six years ago, in her first professional show out of theatre school, she generated major buzz at SummerWorks in Andrew Kushnir’s verbatim show The Middle Place, set at a Rexdale halfway house for youths.
Amo-Adem, who at the time was living a few doors down from the actual house being depicted, played both a jaded, seen-it-all resident and one of the social workers.
(Ironically, social work was the career she was headed for before she committed herself to acting. Her biggest clue: she enjoyed class only when she was role-playing in case-study scenarios.)
Her focused and intense performance in The Middle Place earned her the festival’s emerging artist award.
Now she’s gone beyond emerging and is about to break through.
She was part of the Soulpepper Academy a couple of years ago, appearing in a handful of small roles, then returned to The Middle Place when Canadian Stage picked it up and cosponsored a tour.
Last year, again at SummerWorks, she elicited wows in Andrea Scott’s Better Angels: A Parable, playing a Ghanian maid exploited by an entitled white couple.
And just last month, she got huge laughs in the sold-out Paul Gross/Martha Burns vehicle Domesticated, playing, among other things, an earnest and self-involved Oprah Winfrey-like talk show host who would rather listen to herself gab than give her guests air time.
“Amazing” is how she describes her experience on Domesticated, from auditioning for the part (“I remember reading it and thinking, ‘She’s mine! I don’t care who they audition, she’s mine!'”) to watching acting veterans Gross and Burns rehearse their scenes (“It was learning from the masters”).
That was her highest-profile role to date, but it won’t be her last. This summer she joins the ensemble cast in Weyni Mengesha’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s massive nine-part Civil War epic Father Comes Home From The Wars.
But first, in February, she stars in Obsidian’s production of playwright Meghan Swaby’s Venus’ Daughter, which looks at a black woman’s journey to self-acceptance. It contrasts her experience as a Jamaican-Canadian with that of Sara Baartman, a South African woman who was put on display to be anthropologically and sexually analyzed and gawked over as the Hottentot Venus in 19th-century England.
Tanja-Tiziana
“As black women, we have so much baggage with us when it comes to our bodies,” says Amo-Adem, down-to-earth and modest in the NOW Lounge.
In Swaby’s play, Baartman’s hips, genitals and buttocks are examined and exoticized. The residue of that objectification lingers, even two centuries later.
“The way black women are represented in the media is so distorted. It’s always about body parts. There’s this constant inner battle of ‘What am I worth? Is it just because of my body, or am I a whole person?'”
Venus’ Daughter requires Amo-Adem to play several roles – including a tortoise, a flight attendant and an old woman in a change room. She also has to adopt African and Jamaican accents.
The accents are no problem. She emigrated to Canada from Ghana at age five, and at 15, midway through Grade 10, she moved from Willowdale to Rexdale, where, in predominantly black classes, she soon learned the island accents.
It was that move, incidentally, that first sparked her interest in theatre.
“Here I was coming in during the second semester, the new kid trying to fit in with these rough and tough girls in the school, and our drama teacher – I was taking drama just as an arts credit – gave us an assignment to create a seven-minute piece to write, costume, light and perform.”
Amo-Adem presented a playlet about a disturbed teenager who was acting out and who, via therapy, recalls a traumatic experience in which her father forced her to kill her mother.
“Just a little light theatre for you, at 15 years old!” she laughs.
After her performance, she looked up, and the class was silent. Then she saw her teacher sobbing.
“I thought, ‘What did I do?’ I knew the piece was intense, but I didn’t know I had the ability to do that. It was just the tool I needed to be myself in this new environment. I became known as the girl who could act. I made friends. And my teacher told me not to do anything else with my life, that I needed to be an actor.”
Heeding advice from a high school teacher is one thing listening to her factory-worker parents was another.
When her father learned she was going to study theatre at George Brown, he told her to switch to the other department that accepted her, social work.
“He was concerned about a life in theatre, as most parents are, and he wanted the best for me. I studied social work and graduated, even though I wasn’t happy.”
After graduating she took a year off, not sure what to do. Her life changed during a random visit to an uncle who, when she explained her feelings, pulled out the Bible and read her a parable.
“Because,” she laughs, “we’re Christians, and that’s what we do whenever we’re lost. We look to ‘the word.'”
Amo-Adem recounts the Bible story for me, which ends with a man who’s buried money he’s been given being stripped of that money because he does nothing with it.
Mimicking her uncle’s gentle Ghanian accent, she says, “‘And what is the lesson in this?’ I said, ‘I think you’re trying to tell me that I need to do something with the gifts I’ve been given, or I risk losing them.'”
The following day she applied to theatre school at York, and got in. At the end of the year there was an audition for York’s acting conservatory in which only 16 people were accepted.
“I told myself that if I got in, there was no looking back. And I got in. When something’s a calling, you can’t deny it or try to hide it. It will find its way back to you somehow. You need to surrender to it and trust you’ll be taken care of.”
Her faith has been rewarded by some remarkable coincidences. When actor and choreographer Monica Dottor joined The Middle Place, some of Dottor’s Soulpepper colleagues saw the performance. A few days later, Soulpepper asked Amo-Adem to apply to the academy.
When she was working as a cashier at Whole Foods a few years ago, playwright Andrea Scott spotted her and thought she looked like the character for her play Better Angels. Scott’s friend knew Amo-Adem from theatre school, and the two connected. Incredibly, the character’s name was also Akosua.
And then there’s her connection to Venus’ Daughter playwright Swaby. The two had gone to the same elementary school until Swaby left in Grade 6. In 2010, they were both cast in the all-female ensemble Tout Comme Elle, and it took a while before they realized why they looked familiar. A friendship, and collaboration, was born.
Finally, right out of theatre school, Amo-Adem emailed Obsidian’s Philip Akin saying she wanted to talk and show him her resumé now he’s directing her in Venus.
None of this explains the power and authority the woman exudes onstage.
“I grew up very fast,” she says. “In Ghanian culture, girls have a lot of responsibility. At 10 I was making meals while my friends were outside playing. I think that gave me a maturity and an ability to relate to things that are considered to be struggles in life.”
A trip last year to Ghana – her first visit in the 25 years since she left – was a revelation.
“I was in a public transportation van, going through tons of traffic, people were everywhere, selling every little thing they had to make a buck, and I saw the skinniest woman I’d ever seen in my life, with a baby on her back and a bin on her head, selling water sachets.
“I started crying, out of sadness and guilt. That was her reality. I was on vacation, visiting. I got to leave and go home. So when I came back, I knew I had to pursue this career with everything I have, because I’m in a country that allows me to do it.”
glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi
