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Trey Anthony Brings Black Women Onstage

Trey Anthony didn’t even know that her play, ‘Da Kink in My Hair, had been nominated for five NAACP Theater Awards until she started getting congratulatory emails from friends and fans. She even had to check online to confirm the news. But last month, ‘Da Kink took top honors in four of the nominated categories: playwright, ensemble cast, sound and director.

The play features a cast of black women dealing with issues such as coming out, surviving incest, hitting the glass ceiling, raising a child single-handedly and facing shadism – prejudice based on skin tone – in black communities. Anthony said there are pieces of herself in each of the play’s characters: “I tried to put things that I’m battling with or that I’m pondering, or things that I’m really fearful of [in the play]. I usually put those as dilemmas in the characters’ lives.”

‘Da Kink has played in one venue or another every year since opening at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2001, where it boasted the highest ticket sales for the entire festival. It has since sold out theaters and received standing ovations in New York and throughout Canada. The play is headed to London in the fall, and Anthony hopes to open in Los Angeles around the same time.

Anthony, whose parents are both Jamaican, moved from England to Toronto when she was 12. She currently lives in Toronto but is planning to move to Los Angeles within the next few months.

Until recently, Anthony had always performed the play’s lead role of Novelette, a Jamaican hairdresser whose clients provide the play’s core monologues. But she reluctantly gave it up in order to take part in the upcoming Canadian television production of ‘Da Kink when the shooting schedule and the play’s London opening were in conflict.

Anthony, who recently turned 33, acknowledged that it was a luxurious dilemma – having to choose between doing her own TV show or her own play – but she had a very hard time with the decision. “It was the first time in the six years of doing the play that I wasn’t involved, and I felt like you could’ve killed me,” she said.

The 13-part television series will air in September on Canada’s Global Television. Britain’s BBC and Channel Four have already expressed interest in picking it up, and the show’s producers are looking for a U.S. broadcaster as well.

This isn’t the first television outlet for Anthony’s play. In 2004, ‘Da Kink was adapted into a one-hour television special for Canada ‘s Vision TV. But in that program she played Novelette’s younger sister, whereas in the series she will play Novelette as she has onstage.

While the play focuses on the clients coming into Novelette’s salon, these characters are secondary in the television series, which focuses more on Novelette and her family. According to Anthony, the subject matter is the same, although the format differs: “We deal with the same gritty issues in the show, but we have to tie it up all nicely in a half hour, so that has been the challenge.”

It was important to her to keep the integrity of the play intact and maintain creative control, which she has done as a producer and head writer for the show. “The play really was a brand, and people already recognized it, so I felt it was important for people who had seen it and connected with it – to not disappoint them when it came to TV,” Anthony said.

She never expected so much interest in her work: “It was my first play, and I thought, if it does well in the Fringe I’ll be happy, but it just kind of took on a life of its own. People really started responding.”

Some of those people included members of Anthony’s family, a few of whom reacted with a measure of dismay. “My mother’s always like, ‘All our business is on stage,” Anthony said. “‘If you want to know what’s going on with our family, then go to Trey’s show.'”

Anthony cites coming out to her family as catalyst for writing the play. She is especially close to her grandmother and mother, who had negative reactions to her coming-out. Her grandmother stopped talking to her for two years, and Anthony felt compelled to come out publicly to end her own isolation. “As black lesbians, we don’t see ourselves reflected at all, and very few of us are public about being queer and being out,” she explained. “So I felt there was a need for me to be very public, to say I know I cannot be the only one.”

She continued: “We’re known to be a very homophobic culture. It’s sad but it’s true. So, I think, for my mother to have a child who was saying ‘I am a lesbian’ was shocking. She didn’t know anyone else. It was a matter of her shame, and then I took on her shame as well and thought there was something that was really wrong with me. ‘Da Kink really came about from trying to write through that disappointment and shame that I had let down my family. It became very therapeutic.”

The play’s success has also helped her family come around, particularly after it got picked up by Mirvish Productions, which Anthony referred to as the Canadian equivalent to Broadway (“they do all of the big plays, like Lion King and Hairspray“). It was the first time Mirvish had picked up a Canadian play.

“Even though this was something that stopped my grandmother from talking to me, coming out publicly,” Anthony recalled, “she saw how many people were embracing the work and the truth in the work. That was something that made her come out to actually see the play, and that started a discussion for us.”

Anthony found that her openness prompted frank discussions within her own family as well as others, with many women bringing their families to see her play. And the play seems to be therapeutic for the audience as well as the playwright.

This is clearest in the monologue delivered by a young girl addressing incest in her family. At one point, the actor breaks out of character to tell the women weeping in the front row that it’s OK to cry, and they’re not alone.

“It’s something I hadn’t been public about — incest that had occurred in my own life,” Anthony said. “It was very cathartic for me to have that in the play. I don’t want to have any secrets anymore. I don’t want to carry this around with me anymore, and I need to release it in some way. And then it started to heal other people.”

She continued: “I think that’s the beauty of the play — that we actually talk to the women. There’s no third wall there. We actually go into the audience and say this is a discussion and a dialogue that we’re having and that needs to be had. There’s an urgency in this work.”

Anthony initially thought the only people who’d be interested in ‘Da Kink would be black women, since it is a play about black women’s lives, so she didn’t anticipate its widespread appeal. “Everybody started to come out to see it,” she said. “Black, white, gay, straight, old, young — you name it — were in the audience. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is really connecting with people on a human level,’ and that’s what I always wanted.”

Anthony added the character of Novelette to the play for comic relief after initial readings struck some of her friends as too weighty. By then, Anthony had developed a following for her stand-up performances at Toronto comedy clubs. She began doing stand-up when friends encouraged her to take her impersonations of her grandmother and mother to the stage.

“My grandmother has a huge fascination with me being on the computer, so I went up there talking about how she thinks I’m the best thing ever because I know how to use the internet,” Anthony said. “Every time someone calls, my grandmother’s like: [in a thick Jamaican accent] ‘She’s on the in-ter-net. She knows how to send an e-mail.’ She’s very fascinated, like I’m the only one who knows how to do these things, and she’ll stand and watch me for hours.”

Before taking on stand-up, Anthony was a television producer for the Women’s Television Network in Canada. She is also the founder and executive producer (for five years running) of Dat Girl Sho is Funny! a comedy festival “for women of color or anyone who walks the lines of marginalization” that takes place in Toronto in July.

A critic once referred to Anthony, much to her delight, as “the Oprah Winfrey of Toronto.” Anthony said she especially admires “the empire Oprah’s been able to build while keeping a level of integrity in this business.”

Anthony is also inspired by another fellow Aquarius (with whom she shares a birthday), Audre Lorde, as well as by Whoopi Goldberg. “I’m drawn to how powerful these women are,” she said. “And they seem to be very much about keeping control of their work and sharing and empowering other women along the way.”

With ‘Da Kink, Anthony has already shown these to be words she lives by.

For more on Trey Anthony, visit her official website.

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