Djanet Sears never forgot the first time she saw Othello. It was a 1965 production that aired on British TV, with Laurence Olivier playing the lead—in blackface. “It made me a little uncomfortable,” she once said. “I was 11 years old, and it was like a grain of sand in the belly of an oyster. It stayed there inside me, and as I studied theatre it continued to irritate me.” The experience ultimately led to her Governor General’s Award–winning 1997 opus, Harlem Duet, which gets a revival under her direction this month at the Stratford Festival. A prequel of sorts to the famous tragedy, the story unfolds in three time frames—1860, 1928 and present-day Harlem, at the corner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King boulevards, where Othello abandons his first wife, the black Billie, for his white colleague Mona. It’s about devotion, passion, betrayal and revenge; classic Shakespeare, in other words, from a black perspective. The daughter of a Guyanese father and a Jamaican mother, Sears was born in London, England, and came to Saskatoon as a teenager, before settling in Toronto. When she graduated from York University with a degree in theatre, most of the roles available to black women were prostitutes, drug addicts or slaves. Now her play gets an airing at Stratford—a first for any writer of African descent. The social codes governing race, class and gender have changed a lot in the decades since Sears had her watershed moment with Othello. It seems that’s just enough time to produce a pearl.

Harlem Duet runs at the Stratford Festival to Sept. 22.