I sat, immersed, in Rhoma Spencer's play, Danse Macabre.

The play opens on a group of people creating a costume for Carnival, known in Toronto as the Toronto Caribbean Festival. The room, with feathers, beads and wire scattered about, becomes the fulcrum for a story that spans hundreds of years, from the east coast of Africa to the Caribbean. There's no intermission, ninety minutes straight through, no break to step outside and get your bearings and I think that's deliberate.

One scene remained in my mind days later. It's the nineteenth century, I think, and a group of European heads of state — France, England, Belgium, Germany, maybe Holland — are hunkered over a map table. With pencil and ruler in their fat-fingered hands they slice and dice the African continent to their whimsy. It's comical, at first. Absurdly funny to watch people in power justify an inhumane act that reverberate to the present day, And Spencer brilliantly connects seemingly innocuous moments, such as the bending of wire for the costume to the origin story.

I came away with the beginning of an awareness that the popularized version of the Toronto Caribbean Festival is a veil over a story that started 500 years ago and reverberates, tragi-comically, to the present day. Spencer's Danse Macabre pulls the veil back, leaving you with more questions than you thought you would ever have.

Danse Macabre is the only play I've ever watched that, aftward, I thought to myself, "I need to see that again".