Angelique is presumably based on a historical incident in Montreal in 1734 when a young, black female slave from the Portuguese island of Madiere was publicly humiliated, hanged, and burned at the stake on suspicion of setting fire to the city. This play moves between quasi-documentary mode and expressionism, but it is so heavily overlaid by the playwright’s compulsion to redress injustices of black history and by her penchant for prose-poetry that the historical textures are tainted.

Angelique, who yearns for “loving kindness and understanding” in her new land, is subjected to lascivious male gazes and, as the property of the iron merchant de Francheville, she is forced to submit to his and other males’ carnal appetites. The paternity of her children, born out of wedlock, is always under question. Not that she doesn’t have her own free-ranging libido: she has affairs with fellow-slave Cesar and the indentured servant Claude, but all the while, she harbours bitter rage and a spirit of revolt.

There are fine dramatic moments in this play, but Gale is too eager to make didactic points and succumbs to invalid parallels and contrived poetic effects. Insisting in a note that “Then is now. Now is then,” she draws some far-fetched correspondences between the 18th century and our own. It is one thing to see Donald Trump in the “cocky confidence” of de Francheville, but it is quite another to attempt parallels between the O.J. Simpson trial and Angelique’s.

Gale’s authorial voice is overprojected. Angelique sometimes breaks into prose-poetry and dialectical sophistications about light and darkness. The overall effect, then, is a wish fulfillment fantasy rather than precise acuity and authenticity.