Veteran hip hop emcee Belladonna aka Donna-Michelle St. Bernard towards her pen towards a different stage with her award-winning new play, Gas Girls, a look at the lives of two sex trade workers in an economically depressed region.   The show is set for a ten show run from November 5^th to 14^th at Theatre Passe Muraille, and brings specificity to the emcee’s lifelong message of universal connectivity.  

 

“ Off My Chest was irate,” she admits of her 2006 independent EP, “but that’s an asset in hip hop.   It’s a type of passion.   Gas Girls called for more nuance.”   With the dissolution of her band The Awakening, Belladonna stepped offstage in 2008 as Donna-Michelle St. Bernard to act as Obsidian Theatre’s playwright in residence, following a year in the company’s playwriting unit.   “Playwriting is a complete reversal of my skills.”   She explains.   “I’ve spent years condensing encyclopaedic information into three minute missives.   For this medium, I had to relearn the art of taking my time and Philip Adams has helped me find the way to make this story as accessible as it should be.”    

 

Director/dramaturge Philip Adams elaborates, “Although it might appear that these young women who sell sex for gasoline are at a great distance from Toronto, I believe they live next door to us. These women are strong, imaginative, creative, have families they care for, but they’re still lost. This doesn’t make them different from, say, Aboriginal women on the lower east side of Vancouver, or any number of women facing poverty.   In June, a Virginian woman was charged with prostitution for accepting a $100 gas card.”

 

Gas Girls was honoured with Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge Emerging PlayRites Award in March and placed second in Queen’s University’s Herman Voaden Playwriting Competition in April.   An excerpt was presented at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Buzz Festival in May. Through the Voaden prize, the play benefited from a development workshop at Queen’s University in Kingston before returning to Theatre Passe Muraille. This production builds on the momentum of NHP’s Summerworks success with Job’s Wife by Yvette Nolan .

 

New Harlem Productions is an artist centred company whose directive is to develop new works by artists of colour, to contribute to vital dialogues through artistic expression, to create a platform for necessary stories to be told.   In 2008 NHP presented works in development including the Dis Place reading series at Summerworks 2008 (featuring Scattering Jake by Yvette Nolan, Future Folk by the Sulong Theatre Collective and Gas Girls by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard), The First Stone at bcurrent’s rock.paper.sistahs festival 2008 and Nalo Hopkins’s The Money Tree at Factory Theatre’s CrossCurrents Festival 2008.