How Tonya Pinkins Turned a Campy Rap Battle Against Herself Into Subversive Performance Art

You shouldn’t dish it out if you can’t take it, and make no mistake: Tonya Pinkins can take it. The Tony winner recently released a music video in which she engages in a verbal brawl with herself. But while the video is wacky (the backing track samples her Caroline, or Change 11 o’clock number “Lot’s Wife”; Pinkins plays a Rastafarian referee; there are multiple shots of her inexplicably boxing), the intention behind it is unflinchingly astute.



“I love to laugh at myself; I think it’s the best healer,” Pinkins, currently traveling in Indonesia, told Broadway.com. “Richard Pryor is my favorite comedian. He made you laugh about his crack addiction and blowing himself up.” She hopes to keep the therapeutic project going; in a follow-up video, she challenged celebrity friends—including Hamilton wordsmith Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tony-winning Twitter comedian Laura Benanti—to follow suit.

The idea came to Pinkins after attending a YouTube panel at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The event, hosted by the Blackhouse Foundation, inspired a YouTube binge and her discovery of the “Roast Yourself Challenge.” Determined to make her own entry, she recruited writer and director Isaac Klein to pen the lyrics, supplying him with “heaps of links of nasty stuff from the web” about her that she had compiled.

“It always stings when people say hurtful things,” the actress says of the material she was able to draw. “When it’s in writing, it’s like it’s said again and again and again. I believe that facing that pain and moving into it is exactly the kind of strength those of us who believe in equality are going to need in the Trump Era. We cannot back down, deflect or defend.”



No tribulation of Tonya Pinkins is safe from her own jabs, from her dramatic departure from Classic Stage Company’s Mother Courage and Her Children to the floundering sales of her most recent Broadway stint, Holler If Ya Hear Me. She puts her personal life back on trial as well, alluding to her string of contentious divorces and referring to herself a “deadbeat excuse for a mom,” reclaiming a term The New York Post used to denounce her in a 2003 piece over her failure to uphold court-ordered child support payments.

Enlisting peers to revisit those hardships with her was a challenge. The video features myriad fellow performers, including Christine Ebersole, Donna Murphy and the cast of Falsettos nodding along, reacting (under direction Pinkins supplied them) and occasionally joining in on certain lyrics. “My friends were very protective and didn’t want to say the lines,” she says. “So I got them twerking. And I told them, ‘I lived it; you only had to hear about it.’”

Pinkins’ custody hearings with her estranged second husband Ron Brawer began in 1993, around the start of what she now deems “a particularly painful period of my life.” It was then, she recalls, that she said a prayer: “I said, ‘God, if I can survive this and still find a way to laugh about it, I will know the divine is working in my life.’”

The divine is indeed working: “I laughed so much over the four months of making this. It was just awesome for me."