Charles Officer & Abena Malika

By Shaundra Selvaggi

Sway caught up with critically acclaimed director Charles Officer in the middle of rehearsals for the second run of the hugely successful A Raisin in the Sun.

What originally drew you to the The Soulpepper Theatre Company production?

I’d read this play before a long, long time ago and I even remember this first acting class I was in, the acting teacher said to me, “One day you should play this role.”  And I said, “Never! I’ll never be able to do something like this.”

When I heard Weyni [Mengesha] was directing it, I was resistant at first because at the time, I was heavily focused on the filmmaking side of things.  And Weyni kept saying come, come, come.  She even came to the set of Nurse.Fighter.Boy and said, “You need to audition for this play.”  And I said, “There’s other actors, man. I’m tired.  I’m sick.” But I went to read with Alison [Sealy-Smith] and that day, they gave me the part.  It was pretty quick the way it happened.

Did you ever feel pressure in taking on the iconic role of Walter Lee?  Sidney Poitier and P. Diddy, anyone…

Of course!  It was funny because when they shot the P. Diddy version here, I was invited to the set and I went down and it was amazing just being in that energy.  But I was terrified. I was terrified more so, I think, of Sidney Poitier doing it and what I had known about it from seeing the film years back.  I thought, how am I going to stand up for this thing? But I think that when you make the character your own, that’s when you can forget about all those things and who’s done it before you.  And you’re just in that moment.  You are this person.

Why do you think this 50-year-old play still resonates with so many today, regardless of race?

I think it’s like Shakespeare, like any great story that stands the test of time.  [It’s] because of the story and the way it’s put together.  Lorraine Hansberry is a genius in the way she was able to construct a conflict around dreams. How, in a tight-knit family, everyone has dreams to take themselves out of a sense of poverty, but at the same time, those avenues to get there are different. And I think we all experience it. I mean, I love that it’s a different time and it’s black culture in America.  But the core of the story translates whether you’re Italian living in Italy or you’re living in Iraq.  You have these family dynamics, these things that we want.  Whenever there is poverty and and dreams, I think these stories are always relevant.

Your latest film Mighty Jerome will have it’s world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 8,  but you’ll be here in Toronto…

Yeah, it’s the story of my life.  The same thing happened with Nurse.Fighter.Boy where I was only able to go to one screening at the Toronto film festival before I had to head off to Calgary [for the 2008 production of A Raisin in the Sun].

There’s a good contingency of family and friends of Harry Jerome who appear in the film and will be in town for the premiere. And I felt like I made it for the people.  Of course I want to be there to represent the film, but at the same time, I feel like it’s gonna be well represented and it’s a piece of the man that people have never seen in cinema.

Critics are already raving about the choice of monochrome cinematography…

While I was developing the film and [meeting] with people, I went to their houses and interviewed them. Most of the people who are interviewed in the film are 70 and up, but they are all these pioneers and I wanted to put them up in a Gordon Parks type of portraiture.  Gordon Parks did these beautiful black and white photographs.

I started to get my hands on some archives, but I also shot a lot of [footage] myself and re-enactments and I knew that I wanted to shoot on black and white film.  And I just followed through with it so that in mixing the different mediums and formats, it felt consistent as an aesthetic choice. The monochrome is really black and white and it puts you in the time, but it keeps you contemporary.  So it all just made sense.

You’ve experienced some hardships of your own with regard to sports injury [ tendinitis of the wrist kept Officer out of the NHL]. Did your own experience give you a greater connection to the Harry Jerome story?

Definitely.  The big thing in the journey of finding out things about him [was that] his injuries were real and everyone that said it was psychological.  [With] myself, my injury was real, but it was highly psychological.  At the time, I was a fish out of water in the United States playing ice hockey—which you know, there aren’t a lot of black folks around.  And I’m away from home in Salt Lake City, Utah.  When I got injured, why [I ] didn’t recover had really little to do with injuries.  It was where my mental state was at.

When you become injured now there’s sports medicine and therapists that help prepare athletes for high pressure situations and Harry didn’t have that.  He came back after his first bout with the media as a 20-year-old, and I was the same age and I wasn’t mentally strong to continue.  But he went further and experienced more and went on even further, still experiencing more.

He had the personal drive and endurance within his spirit at such a young age.  And it’s so beautiful and I think can inspire a lot of youth.  And if I had seen or known about him earlier, who knows what I would have done.  Maybe I wouldn’t be doing this play, I’d be out playing ice hockey.

Everything happens for a reason though, right?

A Raisin in the Sun premieres at the Young Centre of Performing Arts October 19 and runs through November 13.  Visit www.soulpepper.ca for schedule and tickets.  Check out clips of Mighty Jerome on www.nfb.ca.