Writer, performer and educator Valerie Mason John, better known as Queenie, was given her nickname a while ago by a group of gay male friends from San Francisco who said that she was the biggest queen they had ever known. Years later, while maybe not as wild as she once was (who is?) but just as fabulous, the name Queenie has stuck.
This year, as part of the 29th annual Edmonton International Fringe Festival, Queenie will be bringing her camp sensibilities to tackle another royal highness, the Queen of England. In the North American premiere of her one-woman show, Brown Girl in the Ring—Queenie will be playing a black woman who has the duration of the play to convince the audience that she is the Queen of England.
Helping Queenie's character out on stage is a small cast of identities, including a young , innocent and black Michael Jackson performing lines such as "You'll be all white in the morning." While the play has a humorous premise, queers will pick up on the interesting ideas around history, family, citizenship, belonging, people and populations being disappeared and the ways institutions such as the Royal Family replicate and inflict societal violence that come up in the play, making Brown Girl in the Ring a funny and thought-provoking experience.
Queenie wrote the first incarnation of Brown Girl in the Ring more than 10 years ago in the UK where she lived. The play was part of a theatre experience in which playwrights created work around their own cultural references. At the time she was thinking about how growing up the Royal Family (all white) dominated the cultural space, and how being the only black person in her adoptive white family was impacting her. Questions came up: how does the dominant, omnipresent image of the Queen in schools and on our money inform those who cannot see themselves in her majesty's portrait? How is the Royal Family the ultimate symbol of heterosexism? Not only do they reproduce, they reproduce living gods. And, what can be gained by queering who gets to be the Queen? How do our own complicated identities get bleached out in the face of dominance as the Royal Family?
Through doing the work to write the play she started to understand herself better. "I am not black, I am coloured, we are all coloured," says Queenie, sharing something she realized at the time. She also started to see how people of colour are disappeared from history including African descendant Princess Sophie Charlotte who upon marrying King George III of England became the Black Queen of England. She has been nearly written out of history. Queen Sophie's story helped inspire Queenie to imagine and play on the theme, "What if a black woman really was the next Queen of England?" The play, braiding together humour, facts and contemplation, premiered in London to one critic writing that Brown Girl in the Ring is, "A royal meditation of bigotry from a royal highness with a difference."
A decade later, now located in Edmonton, Queenie decided to revisit the play and rework it for Canadian audiences. Along the way, Queenie has provided herself a chance to learn more about Canada including the pride of Tim Horton's and the shame of how aboriginals are treated. She sees how Canada is no different than the UK in the ways we wish—as a society—to not discuss some things. "Sweep it under the rug" is a reoccurring line in Brown Girl in the Ring referring to the ways in which difference—all kinds of difference: race, sexuality, religion, class and others—are not properly discussed in polite society. Through her art Queenie carves out a space for people to have these discussions.
While it is ultimately up to you whether you believe that Queenie's character is the Queen of England the journey that leads you there may tell you a lot about yourself and the society you live in. The Queen is Dead, Long Live Queenie.
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