Onika Henry performing in Afeni | Photo by Adam Bailey
Presented by Still Your Friend
In the early 1970s, Afeni Shakur, and 20 other Black Panthers, were put on trial for over 150 trumped-up charges and threatened with 300 years in prison. The overall flavour of these crimes, when dumped into the bogus soup cooked up by government, was conspiracy. (Which is deeply ironic given the reality of the situation.) She chose to represent herself. The “Panther 21” were found not guilty of all charges, due, in large part, to her efforts.
One could easily be tempted to turn a review of Afeni into a play-by-play of the historical facts. But the above lede is the extent to which I’ll get into the weeds on this woman whose massively famous son all but eclipsed her own bad-ass achievements. His name, we are told at the top, will mark the end of the story. I, too, will only mention Tupac once.
Written and directed by Fringe darling Adam Bailey, this fits snuggly into his oeuvre—a casually engaging, anecdotal storytelling style that turns culturally mythic figures into accessible people we can gossip about. He taps into a strange duality, allows his subjects to exist on a precarious plane, both life-size and iconic.
Bailey isn’t performing this, though. His collaborator here is Onika Henry, whose presence as an actor, a teacher and a Black woman, helps inform this portrait. She has, for the most part, suitable humour and gravitas. As per Bailey’s established mode, Henry isn’t embodying Afeni Shakur herself directly, she’s offering us a conduit through which Shakur and a handful of supporting personalities are made vivid and tangible to us.
Theatrically, this isn’t very ambitious. Bailey’s heavily researched writing (information, details) and Henry’s performance (vibes) are the sole focus. And they are enough. Henry’s outfit is an obvious, though casual, riff on the Black Panther uniform. There are some mood shifts in the light, but these don’t feel especially purposeful. Even as a gesture to break up the aesthetic monotony, I’m not sure it’s well-executed or even necessary here.
At the performance I attended, Henry did fumble with the text, not uncommon in live theatre, but it happened often enough to feel rather distracting. Bailey himself, when performing, tends to get ahead of himself, tripping over the words in his enthusiasm to get the juicy bits, but that’s not what’s happening here. I imagine her mastery of the material will improve with repetition and those wrinkles will smooth out over the run and subsequent tour.
Most importantly, this sheds some much needed light on an important figure in a way that feels compellingly informal. In retrospect, I think I would prefer to see this in a much smaller venue, where Henry, mere feet away from anyone in the audience, could have more intimate and intensive hold on the room.
