"Door of No Return" Coming to Guild Hall

[caption id="attachment_57437" align="alignright" width="449"] Nehassaiu deGannes.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

Donna Bruton looked back at her friend. She stood in the tunnel where enslaved Africans once walked in chains, one after the other, toward the ships waiting on the west coast of Ghana. One foot through a portal that once marked a one-way journey.

“Take a picture of me,” Ms. Bruton had said. “Take a picture of me coming back through the Door of No Return.”

Fifteen years have passed since. And it is still a moment that gives Nehassaiu deGannes chills.

She looks at the photo she took of her late friend every so often, and she knew she would write about it someday—which is exactly what she did.

A decade after its premiere, her one-woman play, “Door of No Return,” will make its return on Tuesday, November 22, at Guild Hall in East Hampton, as part of the JDT Lab series—at a time that is particularly poignant, Ms. deGannes said.

“To be honest, I am really reflecting on what it's going to mean to do this piece in November 2016, in the wake of this election cycle, and thinking about the way in which several histories converge with the present,” she said during a recent telephone interview. “The present is always intimately connected with our past. And for me, the piece is very much about unsilencing that past, unsilencing those connections as a form of transformative healing. It is an intense piece.”

Part docu-drama, part ritual theater, Ms. deGannes’s one-woman show explores the lives of 18 characters—heroes and villains ranging from immigrants to political refugees to historical figures, and even herself—and pushes audiences to embody them as she does, defying segregation of personal history and narrative in a collage of stories.

Her own story begins in Trinidad, where she was born, and moves to Canada when she turned 3. But before she immigrated, she spent time with her grandparents in the Caribbean, often tagging along with her grandfather to the market.

“When I would come home from the market, I would promptly put his hat on my head and take the empty sack that the grapefruits and oranges would come in, and I would traipse around the dining room table and regale them with stories about all the people I met at the market that day. And I had all their voices,” she dissolved into a laugh. “I wasn't supposed to become this artist.”

She was on the lawyer-doctor track for the better part of her adolescence, she said, despite her parents deeply valuing the arts. Before they lived in Toronto, they would drive three hours from their small town to get to the closest theater.

“Even so, my father did not want me to go into the arts—at all. There was no contradiction to be had,” Ms. deGannes said, and then paused. “My father unexpectedly passed away when I was 17, so the permission to become an artist came quite unexpectedly.”

She has found her voice as a poet, playwright and actor, but “Door of No Return” remains deeply personal, she said. It explores issues close to her, including her experience as an “insider-outsider, not ever fully belong anywhere,” she said.

“I’ve had a number of friends say to me, ‘Oh, but you're not really black! You're brown!’ or ‘I don't even see you as black anymore!’” she said. “Yes, you know me and you can see me, maybe I’m challenging your notions of blackness—whatever those are. That doesn’t make me not black. I don’t want my lived and ancestral, cultural experiences denied to me as a way of coming to the table. I don’t think any of us want or should have that requirement placed upon us, nor should my history be privileged above someone else’s, nor theirs over mine. Nor should we feel that fear has to be the go-to response to the fact that we recognize there is a difference.”

This is where racism, classism, homophobia and misogyny live, she said, and is waiting for the day that empathy becomes key, leading the world away from divisiveness.

“You know that feeling of the last gasp of the beast, where it's wildly thrashing its tail at the end, in a fit of destructive desperation?” she said. “I'm kind of hoping that's what we're seeing. It's the horror movie where you think you've quelled the boogieman and they rise up and then they're finally put down.”

She sighed. “I hope that's what we're seeing.”

“The Door of No Return,” written and performed by Nehassaiu deGannes, will stage on Tuesday, November 22, at 7:30 p.m. at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, as part of the JDT Lab series. A Q&A will follow. Admission is free and reservations are encouraged. For more information, call (631) 324-0806, or visit guildhall.org.