In the new play Table for Two, a woman searches for love — and herself — through the world of online dating

Playwright Akosua Amo-Adem describes herself as a "hopeless romantic."

Her new play, Table for Two — directed by theatre veteran Djanet Sears — is about one woman's search for love and for herself. It's also about the specific challenges that come with dating as the child of West African immigrants, including cultural expectations, which can sometimes weigh heavily. 

Like Amo-Adem, the protagonist Abena Ohemaa Frimpong, or Abby, was born in Ghana and raised in Toronto as the only child of an Ashanti woman. And there's pressure to carry on the family's lineage.

"I think that's an important detail that the play offers people who are coming to see it," Amo-Adem said. "When they engage with specifically West African women who are older, who are single, who are unmarried, there's more understanding of what their experience might be."

Table for Two opens with Abby getting ready for a date with someone she met online. She tries on different wigs to match her outfit, and this is full of meaning for Amo-Adem. She said she has never seen Black womanhood represented that way on stage.

"We're out here; we exist; our stories matter," she said. "And [they] deserve to be told in the fullness of our experiences."

Table for Two — a co-production of Soulpepper and Canada's oldest Black-run theatre company, Obsidian — is an idea Amo-Adem was working on for a long time. 

In 2012, she was part of a training program at Soulpepper, where she met the late director Daniel Brooks. He instructed her and her fellow participants to write a piece about waiting that was either highly political or entertaining. Amo-Adem chose the latter. She wrote a piece about a woman who thought her date had stood her up, but actually she was late. 

In 2015, Amo-Adem won a competition where she performed a monologue titled Table for Two. And soon after, she started working on turning that monologue into a play.

"It's grown over the years as I've grown," Amo-Adem said. "It's a very intimate piece for me because I've been working on it for so long. 

"I wasn't anticipating the amount of rewriting that I would be doing with this piece. Every time I went back to [writing], it required something of me. It asked something of me that I had to surrender over to."

The play is about self-exploration. For Amo-Adem, adulthood is about deciding if what you want is really what you want or if it's just what people have said you should want. It's also about reflecting on different kinds of relationships that aren't necessarily romantic, like those with friends and family. 

In Table for Two, Abby's mother (Bola Aiyeola) must also work through her own journey of self-discovery. Amo-Adem hopes mothers in the audience will see they can reclaim who they were before motherhood or marriage. 

"It's very vulnerable to write [about] things that are inspired by personal experiences," she said. "But I'm also somebody who believes that the job of the artist is to tell the truth."

For Amo-Adem, the truth is that it's OK to be single. It's OK to feel lonely and to want human connection. And most importantly, it's OK to say you feel this way out loud. 

"Honesty is the only way that we can move forward as a community," she said. "If my play can be an hour and 40 minutes of catharsis, of laughing and healing, I feel like it has accomplished its assignment." 

Table for Two runs from Feb. 7 to Mar. 2 at Soulpepper Theatre (50 Tank House Lane) in Toronto.