A better life?
Play explores what really happens when Mom leaves family for work
How Black Mothers Say I Love You, the new play that opens at the Great Canadian Theatre Company next week, was inspired by an exchange between playwright Trey Anthony and her cancer-stricken 80-year-old grandmother.
In her playwright’s message, Anthony writes about asking her grandmother if there was anything she regretted.
The answer: “My biggest regret was leaving my children … Sometimes as a mother you have to do what is best for your children. But they will never understand.”
Before Anthony was born, her grandmother made the difficult decision to leave her children in Jamaica while she worked in England, an experience shared by many black women.
In fact, Anthony’s own mother left her children to find a better life for the family in Canada.
“I was left behind,” writes Anthony.
“Even though my family is now reunited, we never fully recovered from these separations.”
The script began as Anthony’s attempt to understand the complicated history of her family, a “love letter of understanding,” she calls it.
It’s a followup to her hit play, Da Kink In My Hair, which was turned into a popular Canadian television series about 10 years ago.
First produced by Toronto’s Factory Theatre in 2016, How Black Mothers Say I Love You tells the story of Daphne and her two adult daughters, Claudette and Valerie, who, as children, were left in Jamaica for six years when Daphne found work in Canada.
The emotional aftermath of that decision is revealed in the fraught relationships between the siblings and their mother, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.
The GCTC production may be the first time Anthony has not been intimately involved in taking her work to the stage.
This time, it’s directed by Kimberley Rampersad and features a cast of actors new to GCTC audiences, including Lucinda Davis, Malube, Samantha Walkes and Bénédicte Bélizaire.
GCTC artistic director Eric Coates writes in the program that he found the script “disarming,” partly because of the touch of Caribbean magic realism that is introduced as the family’s emotions are unpacked.
It also challenged his view that Caribbean migrant labour consists primarily of male farm workers.
“I rarely considered the women who made the move to Canada and the subsequent disconnect from their children,” Coates wrote.
“This story of Daphne and her daughters is a humbling lesson in identifying my own blind spots when it comes to the complexities of emigration and its impact on an entire generation in the Caribbean Canadian diaspora.”