The KINK in this PLAY
‘IT ISN’T ACTUALLY BORING, BUT IT CONVEYS AN EXAGGERATED BELIEF IN ITS OWN EFFECTIVENESS’
HOW BLACK MOTHERS SAY I LOVE YOU Factory Theatre, Toronto
Trey Anthony is best known theatrically as the author of Da Kink in My Hair, a successful play that gave birth to a less successful television series. The best to be said for her new play How Black Mothers Say I Love You is that a television spin-off is an unlikely prospect.
Da Kink, set in a hairdressing salon, was less a play than a revue, a succession of sketches. That’s a description, not a value judgment. Anthony wrote entertaining material for her staff and customers, some of it funny — and one item, a monologue for a young abuse- victim, searing. The best things in How Black Mothers Say I Love You are set speeches too. This piece, however, really is a play, of the conventional kind, or at least it’s trying to be. It fails because the structure that should support the arias is jerry-rigged.
We meet Daphne, born and raised in Jamaica, now living in Toronto, and her two grown daughters Claudette and Valerie. They too were born in Jamaica and spent their earliest years there while their mother was in Canada, working to earn enough money to bring them over and support them. While there she gave birth to another daughter, Cloe, who died in childhood.
Daphne has terminal cancer. She has given up on doctors, putting all her trust in God. She’s an evangelical Christian, forever clutching her bible. This places her at odds with Claudette, a lesbian just out of a relationship and also just out of living in Montreal. To hear her tell it, she had moved there primarily to get away from Daphne. Valerie, by contrast, has made an approved marriage, to a prosperous white man. Their childless union is, by Valerie’s own account, a roaring success.
So, how do black mothers say “I love you” to their daughters? Apparently, like mothers all over, by feeding them ( Valerie tries to help, but Daphne thinks her cooking is terrible) and by quarrelling with them. Claudette has hardly returned before she and her mother start fighting; Valerie, who has always been the peacemaker, does her best to pour oil. The main issue, of course, is Claudette’s lifestyle. A subsidiary, though perhaps complementary, one is her reluctance to accompany her mother and sister to church. There are still deeper springs to Claudette’s anger. She feels that Daphne neglected her and Valerie in favour of her lost and adored Cloe. Even before that, she had abandoned them, leaving them with their grandmother while she went off to Toronto. All of which prompts a fiery outburst from Daphne, detailing all she had been through to provide for her girls, both before and after sending for them. Already working two jobs she had taken on a third, just so Claudette in particular could have the things she wanted.
That speech is the highlight of the play. One wonders, though, why Daphne had waited so many years to make it. It seems equally unlikely that Claudette would have waited so long to unleash her own resentments. Valerie also has revelations to make, less explosive but more believably timed. There’s no suggestion in the play that the characters, as certainly happens in families, are re- staging battles that they have fought a hundred times before. Rather, they appear to have saved them all up, for our benefit and their author’s convenience.
As Daphne, Ordena Stephens-Thompson makes the most of her big outburst; elsewhere she’s less compelling, with a weakness for supposedly endearing mugging. Khadijah Roberts- Abdullah ( Claudette) and Allison Edwards-Crewe ( Valerie) are similarly uneven, fastening on occasional moments of truth and treading water in between.
One of the play’s sad differences from Da Kink is that it’s directed by its author. Her staging is tentative, too often leaving her actors hanging around in implausible positions. Her choices are especially hard on her fourth cast- member. Beryl Bain plays Cloe who makes ghostly appearances in a white nightgown whenever her name is mentioned — as awkward a device as you could hope not to encounter. She also briefly plays two other roles; in one she’s part of a flashback that would work better without her, though it would still seem contrived. In the other she officiates in the one scene that takes place outside Daphne’s home. Between them these two episodes fracture the play’s unities of space and time, a liberty that it cannot afford.
What strength it has is strictly of the old- established kitchensink variety.
It isn’t actually boring, but it conveys an exaggerated belief in its own effectiveness. Until March 5.