What started off as a little unknown play during Toronto’s Fringe Festival in 2001, Da Kink in my Hair has now exploded to the point of selling out nearly its entire current run at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
The play follows a group of black women who challenge the ailments of Caribbean culture and battle their own inner demons. I was more than a bit excited to see the show, having grown up in a Caribbean household myself. Still, I had never heard words like “calliou” and “picknie”-the actors strikingly performed in full Patois-unlike mainstream media which usually waters down our “broken English” for fear of it being incomprehensible.
The play embodied all aspects of being black. Beginning with an opening scene of the “motherland” in Africa, it quickly moved to the African diaspora in the Caribbean, and then the Caribbean diaspora in Canada. However, the incongruent flip-flop between these ideas only began to make sense by the third scene, which settled on a group of West Indian women who meet at a hair salon and convey their pain through moving monologues.
Playwright Trey Anthony also stars in the play as Novelette, the owner of the salon. Although Anthony had some difficulty during the first half of the play in convincing the audience of the authenticity of her performance, by the end of the play she had grown into her character.
The simple set of nothing more than a few chairs worked well, as the action onstage was chaotic enough to fill the large space, moving from lively West Indian humour to powerful, moving monologues. The bumpy ride between the two extremes was overshadowed by the play’s ambitious exposure of the faults within Caribbean culture-homophobia, racism, black-on-black violence, and of course the “kinky” hair of the title and the conflict of wanting to have European-type locks instead.
By far the star of the show was D’bi Young, who played young child Stacy-Anne. She tells her story of envy for the West while growing up in Jamaica, and is finally sponsored to come to Canada, only to be sexually abused by her stepfather. With raw emotion, Young finally brings the play around to its universal message: We must come to terms with our inner pain, and accept the “kink” within us all.
