Prominent Trinidad and Tobago playwright, screenwriter, actor, and director, Tony Hall (born Michael Anthony Hall), died on April 27 after suffering a massive heart attack on the island of Tobago where he lived, his family has said.
“His pioneering work on local television and theatre, both here and abroad, is recognized. He worked with the TTW to present the Playwrighting Workshop since the Belmont days,” the Trinidad Theatre Workshop said in a post on Facebook.
Hall, 71, became widely known as a producer/presenter on the Gayelle television series. He wrote and directed for street, stage, and screen since the late 1960s and from 1987 he collaborated in Carnival as a mas-maker, working closely with master masman Peter Minshall.
Hall conducted his theatre practice in Trinidad through a playwrights workshop, started in 2003, and his own Lordstreet Theatre “Peoples of the Sea” Company, which he co-founded with Errol Fabien in 1990.
An alumnus of the University of Alberta and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Hall presented the Jouvay Popular Theatre Process (JPTP), implemented worldwide as a performance model for actor ‘training’ and play-making as well as for personal and community development.
He contributed as lecturer and arts facilitator at many institutions in the United States and Europe, as well as the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) and The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine.
Hall also created award-winning works as a screenwriter, director, producer, and performer in film, video, and television since the mid-1970s, mainly with a collective of artists at Banyan Studio. Those projects include: And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon (1992/USA release 1994), an award-winning BBC/TVE/Banyan documentary that gives “an astonishingly searing look at TV” in the Caribbean, and Gayelle (1985-1990), a ground-breaking cultural magazine for television.
Hall, the brother of the popular comedian, Dennis “Spranalang” Hall leaves to mourn, his wife Mary and two children.
-CMC
