Staging Slavery through Historiographic Metatheatre: Lorena Gale’s Angélique and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus

This essay discusses two plays ascribable to the genre of historiographic metatheatre. Angélique by African Canadian actress, director, and playwright Lorena Gale focuses on Marie-Joseph Angélique (1705-1734), the black bondswoman who was tried and executed for starting the fire that destroyed large parts of the French colonial settlement of Old Montreal in 1734. Venus by African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks centers on Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815), a native of what is now South Africa, who was exhibited in Europe as “The Hottentot Venus”. Though equally invested in historiographic metatheatre, Gale and Parks employ distinct dramaturgical strategies that attest to the different ways in which slavery has been inscribed in the national narratives of Canada and the United States of America.