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05.01.08 Bring in Da Kink
National Post
J. Kelly Nestruck
Trey Anthony can remember exactly how she felt when she was walking along King Street a couple of months ago and saw the first posters for the Mirvish production of her play, Da kink In My Hair. "It was ridiculous!" the 30-year-old playwright and actor says with a laugh. "I came back with a camera, I videotaped as I stood by the poster in different poses. I'm a not-used-to-too-much kind of girl."
Anthony's play, about a group of women who hang out in a West Indian hair salon in Toronto, is an incredible success story. Next week, the show - the first she has ever written - will be the debut Canadian play at the 2,000-seat Princess of Wales Theatre. "It's still very dreamlike," Anthony says during a break from rehearsals.
Things weren't going quite so rosy four years ago, when Anthony was a perpetually broke stand-up comic going through a difficult breakup, a time she remembers as her "lowest point."
Though trained as a dramatic actor at George Brown College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she felt pigeonholed as "the funny girl" and decided to write her way out of that perticular dead end with a play that would showcase her talents. Drawing on her personal experience, including time spent as a counsellor at a women's shelter, she wrote a series of monologues about a group of black women dealing with tough issues such as sexism, racism, and incest.
"It was to be a calling card for myself, and also to be therapeutic," she says.
What was supposed to have been a small reading of the first draft of Da Kink at the Now Lounge turned into a big event when fans of Anthony's work with local comedy troup Plaitform showed up en masse. The event sold out, extremely unusual for a reading, and was held over for an extra night. It turned out to be a foreshadowing of the massive appeal of the play.
Since then, Da Kink - especially after some comedy was thrown in - has been smashing all expectations. It was the best-selling show at the Toronto Fringe Festival, and a subsequent four-night remount at Harbourfront Centre sold out. At the New York Fringe festival, it won a Cream of the Crop award, and Anthony was invited to present it as part of an NBC showcase.
Last fall, an expanded (and funnier) production at Theatre Passe Muraille had people lining up around the block trying to get tickets. That production earned Anthony a Dora nomination.
At first, it was mainly the city's black community that supported Da Kink. But during the run at Passe Muraille, Anthony came to realize her play was popular with women of all ethic backgrounds, who kept coming back and bringing their mothers, daughters, and friends.
In one of the play's monologues, a character talks about "shadism," refering to how her mother prefered her lighter-skinned sister over her darker-skinned self. Anthony was shocked when white women were approaching her after performances and telling her how much they could relate.
"They'd say, 'It was like you were talking to me - my sisters who were blond were favoured,' or 'my skinny sister always got everything,' " Anthony says. "It really surprised me."
In reality and as a symbol, hair has always been fraught with conflict in African-American and Caribbean culture. Malcom X wrote of straightening his hair with lye in The Autobiography of Malcom X, while the barbershop movies have tapped a rich comic vein. As Anthony's character, Novelette, the salon's proprietor says, "My great=granny always said, 'If you want to know a black woman, you touch her hair.' She said that is where we carry everything. All of our hopes, our dreams, our pain."
Over time, though, Anthony has discovered the significance of hair of hair to women of all cultures. "For a lot of women, if you're having a bad hair day, your whole day goes awry." Anthony shaved her head during the first production of Da kink four years ago, but still drops into her old salon to talk about the news, eat jerk chicken and learn the latest dance moves.
Meanwhile, Da Kink In My Hair continues to blossom into a bona fide phenomenon. A TV pilot aired this fall, and Anthony is working with CBC and Vision to develop it into a series. There are talks of off-Broadway, but having moved her with her parents from England at the age of 12, Anthony is keen on taking it to London.
Despite her success, she continues to think like the starving artist she was a mere four years ago. (When she heard she was getting paid for rehearsals this time around, she was "blown away.") "To get paid for your work and be able to tell your friends, "I'll buy you that round of drinks,' that's nice," she says. "For it to go this far, I've been truely blessed.