Playwright/performer Trey Anthony had put her house
up for sale and was about to take off for England when the phone rang.
The call was from Mirvish Productions, who wanted to talk about presenting
her hit show, Da Kink in My Hair, as part of their 2004-05 season.
"I was actually packing up my stuff," Anthony remembers. "I
felt my work here in Canada was done and that nothing was happening
so I was all set to go to England because I felt there was new ground
to conquer."
England's loss is our gain. Anthony's vibrant and edgy show, first
seen at the 2001 Toronto Fringe Festival, has made the daunting leap
to a full, commercial production in a large theatre. It opens Tuesday
at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
Anthony wrote Da Kink after working for several years in stand-up comedy.
It began life as a one-woman show, a series of monologues written partly
to showcase herself, partly as an emotional outlet.
"It was a vehicle to show people that I could do dramatic acting," says
Anthony, who trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and George
Brown College. "And it was also very therapeutic at that time as
I had just ended a seven-year relationship.
"As an actor, I was also finding that there weren't any roles
for me as a black woman, as a plus-size woman ... so I decided I needed
to write the roles for myself."
Anthony held a reading of the monologues in February of 2001 and director
Weyni Mengesha was in the audience. (They had met when Anthony appeared
in Mengesha's first play.) Anthony had asked six friends to read the
monologues because she wanted to sit in the audience and listen.
But an audience survey taken at the reading included such remarks as "Where
did you get these women? You have got to keep them."
"I wasn't even in it," says Anthony, laughing. "So I
realized this may not be the one-woman show I was looking for."
Mengesha suggested setting the piece in one location. "We talked
about all sorts of things - a bus station, a church - and
then the hairdressing thing came up," Mengesha remembers. (Anthony
herself plays the owner of the salon; Mengesha also appears in the show.)
Mounted at the Fringe the same year, the piece was a huge hit, helped
by Anthony's marketing savvy. She gave opening-night tickets to local
hairdressers and barbers who passed them on to clients. The show went
to a couple of Fringe fest before Theatre Passe Muraille picked it up.
By then, the scenes in the West Indian hairdressing salon were better
developed, and music and dance were added.
Presented at Passe Muraille in June of 2003, the show proved a durable
hit again. Then nothing happened for a while. No government grants were
available to restage the show.
"I felt I had put my heart and soul and blood into it, that it
had a good run at Passe Muraille but that was it," Anthony says. "It
was very frustrating."
Then Toronto's biggest commercial producer came calling.
For the Mirvishes, characters have been added and more work done on
music and movement. "We are trying to keep the show intimate while
making the text and music even richer," says Mengesha. "But
we are not interested in making this a musical."
To help preserve the show's intimacy, the Princess of Wales has been
reconfigured for the production, using the ground-floor orchestra level
only.
Anthony told Mirvish Productions that she would not water down or soften
the monologues.
"The play is edgy and we talk about a lot of serious topics - incest,
suicide, a woman losing her son to street violence, a woman coming out," she
says.
The Mirvish organization did ask her to add some comedic material for
the intercutting scenes set in the hairdressing salon and this she did.
Anthony also involved herself in the pricing of the show, specifying
that 20 good seats should be made available each performance for $20
and keeping the overall prices down.
"The community has been behind us since day one and we didn't
want to abandon them. There was a great mix at Passe Muraille, with
a 79-year-old Jewish grandmother sitting next to a black B-boy in baggy
pants."
Anthony, who was born in London and was 12 when she moved to Canada
with her mother, would love to take the show "home" to England.
The Canadian-born Mengesha, whose parents came to B.C. from Ethiopia,
wants to present Da Kink in Vancouver.
She notes that she was "one of three people of colour in my school
(so) I had to storytell to explain myself, to make space.
"I'd like to take it to Vancouver for all the young girls who
are in the same predicament as I was, and could totally use this play."
They would both like to restage Da Kink in New York. But who knows?
"This play does what it needs to do on its own and it's never
anything that any of us have imagined," says Anthony. "Someone
sees it, likes it and the next minute we are on a bus going somewhere."
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