5.0
05.01.11 'Da Kink In My Hair gets a new 'do
The Globe and Mail
Guy Dixon
During rehearsals the other day for 'Da Kink In My Hair, the cast members were thinking how far they've come along in their small,labour-of-love play.
When invited to perform at the New York Fringe Festival after debuting to strong acclaim at the Toronto Fringe in 2001, they packed up the few props they had and drove to New York from Toronto, arriving with little money. Then there was the drive to Nova Scotia to perfrom at the Fringe festival there.
Now, 'Da Kink and its look at the lives of women in a West Indian beauty salon is getting the big-budget treatment with a remount by Mirvish Productions. It's the first Canadian play ever to be staged at Toronto's Princess of Whales Theatre.
Yet talking with Trey Anthony, 'Da Kink's creator and lead actor, a few days agoin a concrete bunker of a dressing room behind the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre, she gave no sign of having entered a new life of stage-diva excesses. The grey, ultra-drab rehearsal space where the cast was rehearsing could as easily have been in the kind of fringe-festival spaces where the show originated.
But for Anthony and the others who have nurtured 'Da Kink, the difference between fringe and Mirvish is huge. The play's young director, Weyni Mengesha, used to have to do the lights, and Anthony used to do the costumes and the wigs. "Our drummer used to do the make-up, and I used to be at the Dollar Store getting props for the sets, that kind of thing." Anthony explained.
"What I get from the Mirvish camp is: 'Trey!' " Here, she broke into mock seriousness. " 'You do not have to do this! Don't worry, it's being done!' And I think that's been the hardest thing for me, really."
Anthony, 31, had orignally concieved of the play as a serious, one woman show, partly as a way to tell the semi-autobiographical stories about women in her family, herself, and those she met while working at a Toronto's women's shelter. The power of those stories, Anthony said, still comes through in the character's monologues.
But the original impetus for the work also came from Anthony's desire to branch out of standup comedy. Trained at George Brown College in Toronto and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she had found a niche in comedy and worked on HBO's The Chris Rock Show. But she was adamant about returning to theatre and moving more into writing and dramatic acting, she said.
By the time 'Da Kink was staged at the Toronto Fringe, actors who had read through the parts that Anthony was developing wound up joining the cast, and Anthony, as it turned out, played the more comedic, main character Novelette. After successes in the Toronto and New York fringes, and before staging the show at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille in 2003, the cast was invited back by NBC television to perform for entertainment-industry insiders at the network's small PSNBC theatre space in New York.
"It was worthwhile, in the sense that we made a lot of connections. But I think, for me, at that point, I really wanted to develop the piece at home [in Toronto], and we knew we were coming back to the Theatre Passe Muraille production. I couldn't at that point get my head around it as a television show or anything like that. And I was very much, like, 'I'm a theatre artist!' "
The Passe Muraille production produced a record box-office take for that theatre and attracted a wide audience of non-theatregoers. That's when the Mirvish camp began talking to her. Not being too experienced in the big-time theatre business, Anthony said, she treated these more as casual conversations.
"I didn't realize I was supposed to be pitching!" Anthony said, bursting into laughter. "It was one of those meetings where they were like, 'Well, tell us, where do you want to go with this work? What's your vision for the play?' It was very much this informal dialogue which happened for a long time.
"They said that the reason they were taking the play was that they really wanted to keep the integrity of the piece, that it spoke to a wide range of audiences," Anthony said. "As a writer, I didn't want to be censored, and that was something we really discussed before any deal was put on the table. I had to make sure that the integrity of the piece still remained, because that is what had gotten it this far."
Both Anthony and Mirvish said none of the plays harder-hitting monologues has been toned down. But in expanding it to a two-hour production, from it's original 90 minutes, the play has added more stories, more comedy, more characters, and much more music.
Still, the new production is trying to maintain the play's original intimacy. The stage of the Princess of Wales Theatre will be extended into the audience by a few rows and only 1,000 seats on the ground floor will be sold for each performance.
"Trey wants to reach people. For Trey, probably the ideal thing might have been to go into a 300- or 400-seat, maybe even a 250-seat theatre and run for a year. And you can sometimes build that sort of momentum," said David Mirvish. "We looked at that at one point and considered it. But we just don't have that sort of space."
He emphasized that "this is an interesting experiment for us." Partly because of the limited seating, it likely won't be a big money-making production, he indicated. "If we sell all the seats, we'll pay the rent."
Instead, "you are opening up new doors," Mirvish added. This new production could be licensed to other theatre companies or, at the least, it could help intice new theatregoers and maintain the links between Mirvish and Toronto's smaller-budget theatres.
So how big is the Mirvish budget for 'Da Kink? "I'm not allowed to say! I know it's big! They won't even tell me, but I know it's a BIG budget. I know it's a million-kind-of ballpark," Anthony said. "It's much more than we had in our lives." The budget for the Passe Muraille production was $96,000. The first Toronto Fringe production cost $500.
But the production's size isn't as important to Anthony as attracting a wide audience. Mirvish will help promote the play to high-school and college students and a block of 20 rush seats at $20 each will be set aside to attract those who might not normally come to the theatre.
"That was something that was written in my contract. It was very important to me that the community that i wrote the play for essentially got to see it," Anthony said. "I didn't want people to feel that now she's in the big house, she's forgotten where she came from, or that kind of thing. Or that this [community] work isn't important to me.
"It has to start very grassroots. That's where I came from, and that's what I believe in, that everyone should have accessibility to this type of experience. It shouldn't just be a selected group of people."