TO Live and Soulpepper present ‘da Kink in my Hair, running to Dec. 23.DAHLIA KATZ/Soulpepper
- Title: ‘da Kink in My hair
- Written by: Trey Anthony
- Director: Weyni Mengesha
- Actors: Ordena Stephens-Thompson
- Company: TO Live and Soulpepper
- Venue: St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to Dec. 23, 2022
Critic’s Pick
Have yourself a kinky little Christmas?
In the department of holiday counter-programming, TO Live and Soulpepper have united to bring a big, buoyant 20th anniversary revival of Trey Anthony’s ’da Kink in My Hair to the Bluma Appel stage at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts this month, something for Toronto audiences looking for an alternative to family shows, musicals or Charles Dickens.
Set at an Eglinton West hair salon, Anthony’s play famously went from the Toronto Fringe in 2001 to a record run at Theatre Passe Muraille to commercial success via Mirvish Productions at the Princess of Wales Theatre. It was groundbreaking for Black Canadian drama, and Canadian drama period.
Director Weyni Mengesha has returned to the project for this latest incarnation and cooked up a fresh, new look for the theatrical sensation, credibly introducing it to another generation while also rewarding audiences returning for a touch-up.
For the newcomers, the show’s premise is this: Hairdresser Novelette (an oracular Ordena Stephens-Thompson, who also played the role on the Global TV sitcom spinoff) sees into the souls of a number of her clients over the course of a day’s work. As she says, “If you want to know about a woman – a Black woman – touch her hair.”
Structurally, Anthony’s play goes back and forth between funny or fantasy group scenes – which depict Novelette’s community of clients at the salon, and sometimes incorporate song and dance – and individual monologues by these diverse Black women who get out of the chair mid-cut and step forward to explain the roots of what’s troubling them.
This new production features an excellent ensemble who grab you right away with newly penned salon banter about rapper Kanye West’s recent anti-Semitic comments. It’s an energizing reminder of how the popularity of this show’s initial incarnations was in part because of Anthony’s lack of fear in delving into what is taboo in her community (and other communities too).
The solo sections of the script that follow, on the other hand, have only been subject to relatively minor tweaks. From the pandemics of gun and police violence, to being a queer Black artist rejected by a parent, to working while Black and female in a white-dominated corporate environment, the topics of the monologues remain relevant.
The subjects tackled have, however, become much less taboo – and the risk in reviving ‘da Kink is that the short-ish monologue takes might end up feeling perfunctory in the wake of more recent plays (and other media) that have delved more deeply into them and from up-to-date angles.
So, it’s useful to keep in mind while watching that this play is 20(ish) years old and marked the self-produced debut of a new theatrical voice at a time when Black voices were definitely not regularly centred in Canadian theatre. Ultimately, I think both the marketing of the show as an anniversary production and the way Mengesha subtly places the monologues in a separate world from the updated rest of the production does that trick without fully treating it as a “period piece.”
The joyful highlight of the evening is still to be found from elderly Miss Enid (Obsidian Theatre founding member Satori Shakoor) and her tale of a culinary adventure and sexual awakening that followed in the wake of her husband’s death.
As for the dramatic, shake-you-to-your-core apex, it remains the story of Stacey-Anne (d’bi.young anitafrika), a young girl who has come from Jamaica to Canada to join her mother and her new partner mid-winter.
In terms of the most scorching performances ever seen on a Toronto stage, d’bi.young’s in this role is right up there – and it’s wonderful to get another opportunity to witness it so many years on. They remain an incredibly alive performer, and even steal other scenes where they play more minor comic characters.
Stacey-Anne’s monologue and the dub poem that follows (which d’bi.young wrote) best exemplifies the double-whammy of hurt and healing that makes ‘da Kink so powerful for such a wide spectrum of audience members – even for this theatre critic, for whom the references to Black hair styles, products and treatments go over my white, male head.
The passage of time allows ‘da Kink in My Hair to be seen as a powerful part of a continuum of North American Black theatre that has found original ways to place individual stories in a collective context, from the choreopoems of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970s to the filmed monodramas of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures in the 2020s.
One final note: Designer Joanna Yu’s set fits the unusual and daunting stage of the Bluma Appel perfectly – paying homage to the real Eglinton West with a photorealistic backdrop and layering over a salon that is also an agora and seems to honour the theatre space’s origin as a Greek-style amphitheatre. Maybe the St. Lawrence Centre doesn’t need to be renovated, but just needs to hire Yu to design all its shows?