On the fall evening of Nov. 8, 1946, Viola Desmond took a seat in the whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre of New Glasgow, N.S. Hoping to kill time after her car had unexpectedly broken down, she decided to watch psychological thriller The Dark Mirror.
Suddenly, an usher scurried to her seat, glared a flashlight in her face and asked her to move to the theatre’s upper balcony level. The Roseland Theatre segregated Black people upstairs, reserving the downstairs for white people. With stoic resistance, Desmond declined and politely offered to pay the difference to stay downstairs so she could see the film, explaining she was near-sighted.
But then came the theatre manager, who also angrily asked her to move. She didn’t. The manager left and returned with a police officer, who dragged Desmond out of the theatre in front of onlookers.
She spent the night in jail, not knowing that the act of defiance would forever establish her as a Black civil rights trailblazer in Canadian history.
Written by Andrea Scott and directed by Cherissa Richards, Controlled Damage is a reenactment of this true story and ran at the National Arts Centre from Feb. 13 to 22, paired with a special “Black Out Night” affinity night in celebration of Black History Month. Controlled Damage paints a gripping picture of racism, sexism and the struggle to find identity in Canada’s segregation before the civil rights movement.
With a minimalist set design —merely a square stage with occasional furniture items moving around scene by scene — the play places a heavy burden on its nine actors to carry the emotional nuances of their characters with joviality, humour and distress. Between scenes, a fiddler somberly plays above the stage, anchoring a sound of melancholy and isolation through the heartbeat of maritime music.
Deborah Castrilli, who plays Desmond, carries incredible emotional vulnerability, conviction and a contagious gusto. She does not portray Desmond as the iconic activist or face of the $10 bill, but Desmond as a nuanced and ambitious person struggling to find a sense of belonging as a biracial woman.
Desmond’s story opens with her as a tenacious, kind school teacher who fosters a love of learning among her students. As a young Black woman, she faces harassment from her white superintendent, but that doesn’t deter her from educating the youth and standing up against the racism her Black students face. She eventually leaves teaching to become a beautician, opening a beauty parlour with products made for Black women.
She marries her longtime boyfriend, Jack, and eventually travels all over Nova Scotia to sell her beauty products. It was on one of these trips when the Roseland Theatre experience happened.
Following the incident, Desmond becomes more radicalized in her stance against racism. Controlled Damage beautifully navigates the different approaches Black Canadians took to fight racism before the civil rights movement, fueled by their different lived experiences.
Some were more traditional, like Jack, who believe that with good education and assimilation, equality would be achieved. But others, like Desmond, believe that radical resistance was the only way to move the civil rights agenda forward.
What makes Controlled Damage so gutting is having audience members act as bystanders to the waves of personal confrontation, intimacy and violence in Desmond’s story. To have Castrilli sitting among the audience, before she’s pulled out of the theatre while the crackling 1946 horror-flick played on as though nothing happened, is nothing short of harrowing.
Though it’s hard for some to imagine a time when Canada was so blatantly racist, Controlled Damage reminds us that we aren’t so far removed from this history, and its impacts are still deeply felt today. While Canada never enacted segregation laws like Jim Crow in the United States, segregation still very much existed through systematic racism.
As Beyoncé’s political anthem “Freedom” plays during the final curtain call, the audience is brought back to the present day. Daring to confront hard truths about Canadian history through Desmond’s story Controlled Damage will leave audience members riveted by a sense of injustice, reflective on their role as bystanders to racism and hopefully inspired to enact change.
Featured image provided by the National Arts Centre.
