Motherhouse Read online

  Contents

  Elegy For Madeleine Parent

  Performances

  Performance Notes

  Envoi

  Getting It White

  White Poppy Campaign

  Motherhouse

  Mulch Of History

  Source Notes

  Printemps Èrables

  More About The Photographs

  Also By David Fennario

  à Madeleine Parent et Kent Rowley

  ELEGY FOR MADELEINE PARENT

  I met Madeleine Parent three times

  First time in 1990 during the Oka Crisis

  It was the night the troops moved in on the barricades at Kahnawake with armed intent

  When the news flashed hundreds of us sat down on the street in front of the Hydro-Québec building, expecting the riot squad to arrest us at any minute

  People were scared, I was scared

  Madeleine’s face didn’t even change

  Second time in 2005 at a launcement of a book on community organizing in the Point and I told her I was a maudit bloke de souche from Vielle Verdun like her lifetime partner, Kent Rowley, and she laughed

  She was far from being some kind of uptight doctrinaire humourless and puritanical

  Never tried to play down her haute bourgeois origins

  Always fashionably coutured no matter what the occasion

  She liked to look pretty and she was pretty

  It was her love of life that made her such a good fighter

  Third time in the spring of 2011 when a filmmaker friend took me to see her in her nursing home

  Simple single room with bed, table, computer, and photos of comrades and union mates on the walls along with souvenir posters of past struggles

  She had lost just about all long-term memory but one good look into her eyes and you knew that this was still the same woman who backed down Maurice Duplessis himself and his Sûreté du Québec

  Just a few years before at the age of eighty-seven she organized the patients in her nursing home against an all-lights-out-at-nine-o’clock ordinance

  She won

  She went out fighting

  Salut, Madeleine … Salut, comarade

  Solidarité

  PERFORMANCES

  Motherhouse by David Fennario was first produced February 25 to March 23, 2014, at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal.

  Holly Gauthier-Frankel: Narrator

  with

  Delphine Bienvenu: Carré rouge

  Bernadette Fortin: Carré rouge

  Stephanie McKenna: Carré rouge

  Director: Jeremy Taylor

  Assisted by: David Fennario

  Set and Costume Designer: Laurence Mongeau

  Lighting Designer: Peter Spike Lyne

  Photo Archivist: Pamela Casey

  Choreographer: Pam Johnson

  Stage Manager: Merissa Tordjman

  Assistant Stage Manager: Danielle Skene

  PERFORMANCE NOTES

  I didn’t write Motherhouse with the intention of challenging the current mainstream approach to performance in Canadian theatre, but that’s what seems to have happened.

  Workshopping the piece has taught me to expect artists not to understand an anti-illusionary approach to theatre because, in drama departments all across Canada, students are being taught that acting, real professional acting, means creating the full illusion of a character onstage. As a result, they automatically critique the text and stage notes of Motherhouse from this hierarchical position.

  The critique is valid if the performer is directed to deliver those lines as an illusionary character pretending to be real, but some lines in Motherhouse are deliberately written to not be done in character. The narrator is expected to play those lines as herself, not as a series of real or imagined characters. She comes onstage as herself and remains herself while sharing the story with the audience. The narrator tells a story that she has told before, a story that has already happened, a story she wants the audience to feel and understand. She is only in the moment when she shares her emotions with the audience.

  This technique can have a powerful emotional effect because the performer has to work to involve the audience in the process, rather than just letting them sit back passively appreciating the performer’s emotional take on the text.

  The performance is given over to the audience to use it themselves.

  For example, the jazz singer Billie Holiday doesn’t pretend she isn’t Billie Holiday when she sings a song, or pretend she’s experiencing the emotions expressed in the lyrics; instead, she tells you what she thinks or feels about those emotions, she creates the song with the audience.

  It’s crucial to the performance of Motherhouse that the actor establish herself as herself in performance, otherwise the narrative won’t work. She must let the audience know that she is telling this story and find the movements, tones, attitudes, and ad libs that will make her the focus.

  For example, I once saw the Scots Shakespearean actor Douglas Campbell in a Stratford production of The Tempest. There he was onstage playing the role while at times staring the audience right in the eye as if to say “Did you like that?” I wasn’t sure if he was just screwing around so I asked him after the show if he did it deliberately. “Yes,” he said. “I like people to know it’s me onstage.” And it worked to the point that the whole audience focused on Douglas even though he had a minor role, because he was the only performer up there onstage who was alive in three dimensions.

  More and more as we observe the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, we come across films, novels, and plays that condole or celebrate that war as something honourable, rather than critique and condemn it as one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.

  This trend reflects a massive shift to the Right of our postmodernist intelligentsia in academia over the past thirty years.

  As my friend Pam Johnson said:

  My experience teaching in theatre schools for the past few decades is that theatre training is or should be “neutral” with respect to politics. It is considered bad form to encourage students to develop a political consciousness. They are encouraged to develop an artistic “voice,” but it must always be personalized, no big ideas or worldly opinions.

  It’s a general trend towards passivity that feeds into the current drive in government circles to legitimize war as a routine proponent of Canada’s foreign policy.

  Motherhouse is designed to be used as a political intervention by the antiwar movement and to counter the present hierarchy of illusion onstage and in film and academia. Teaching theatre based on illusion works well for academics living in a tenured bubble, but not for those who want to challenge the present militaristic course of history.

  Take a stand.

  No more pretending to be someone else on or offstage.

  ENVOI

  my childhood dream of stone giant towering above the Avenues stone-grey monolith mechanically crashing through rows of brick tenement crunching and crushing on its way to elsewhere with no mission or purpose

  The dread of going out onto the back balcony in fear of seeing its stolid slabface of concrete indifference

  633 Second Avenue where my mother waited five years for my father to come home from overseas

  World War Two

  First Hydrogen Bomb Exploded November 1, 1952

  – David Fennario

  GETTING IT WHITE

  What’s it like growing up hating the people who taught you how to read and write?

  When I was in high school back in the 1960s and our city hall in Verdun was still flying the Union Jack, some of our teachers seemed quite convinced that their blue-collar students off the Avenues, although we were Protestant anglophone, were definitely inferior,
a bare knotch above the Irish Catholics and the litvaks and polacks, the wops and the peasoups.

  The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal particularly hated the way we spoke English and spent time correcting our pronunciation learned in the streets of the blue-collar quartiers southwest of the Lachine Canal. Griffintown, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Goose Village, and Verdun, where you ate a “sang-wich” on your “gal-drey” and wished people a happy “burt-day” in an accent with a Celtic lilt and a French undertone that branded you forever inferior.

  Every day getting our teacher’s imperial sneer of contempt from the front of the class as we stood stuttering, trying to get it … White.

  I got it right but then gave it up because I didn’t like the kids who did pronounce their words properly, or rather they didn’t like me or my friends off the Avenues. This choice underscores everything I wrote in Motherhouse – telling our history in our own voice.

  Motherhouse is the story of munitions workers in a factory in Verdun, Quebec, that employed thousands of women, including my mother, during the First and Second World Wars. They serviced the war effort while their men served overseas and got killed in record numbers.

  It’s a community that made a living getting itself murdered, a community mothered and maimed by war.

  A story told as a caution by someone whose life was shaped by that communal experience.

  A story that celebrates a resistance to mass murder that rarely gets into the official historical accounts.

  Books Not Bombs

  Healthcare Not Warfare

  No Blood for Oil

  WHITE POPPY CAMPAIGN

  On November 11, in memory of all the victims of war and to show our opposition to current wars and our desire to put an end to war, wear a white poppy.

  The first white poppy campaign was launched in England in November 1933 by the Co-operative Women’s Guild (CWG). This organization of mothers, wives, sisters, widows, and sweethearts of men killed during the First World War did educational work on the socio-economic and political conditions that promote wars. They also led a campaign against the arms trade. Through its white poppy campaign, the CWG not only commemorated all victims of war, but also dissociated itself from commemorations that vindicated the use of military force.

  In 1934, the initiative of the CWG was supported by a newly formed peace movement in Great Britain, the Peace Pledge Union, which from then on took up the production and sale of white poppies.

  Nowadays, the red poppy campaign and official commemoration ceremonies seem to forget that the most terrible consequence of contemporary warfare is that it kills many more civilians than soldiers. We know that the two major conflicts of the twentieth century alone killed nearly seventy million people, most of them women and children, not to mention the physical and mental trauma sustained by survivors and refugees, and those who have to live with destruction all around them.

  At a time when Canada more and more often engages on the path of war and when military and “security” spending are spiralling out of control, commemorating past deaths should not be used as a guise to quietly justify the deaths in recent years and those that will occur inevitably as the militaristic trend continues.

  Échec à la guerre!

  MOTHERHOUSE

  CHARACTERS

  NARRATOR, an anglo woman from working-class Verdun, Quebec.

  MUSIC

  “In Flanders Fields” and other popular patriotic songs of the First World War era play as the audience takes their seats.

  PROJECTION

  Images of various pro-war propaganda focusing on the role of women on the home front fade in and out on the stage scrim.

  SETTING

  A large Canadian flag, with its bands and maple leaf coloured black, dominates the back wall of the stage. Below it, a contemporary recruitment poster for the Canadian Armed Forces shows a Canadian soldier wearing a desert uniform in some war zone like Afghanistan.

  The NARRATOR is dressed in basic black except for a distinctive Carré rouge red patch worn in Quebec by hundreds of thousands of striking students and supporters during the student protests of 2012.

  Lights change.

  NARRATOR recites.

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mark our place; and in the sky

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

  Scarce heard amid the guns below.

  We are the Dead. Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie

  In Flanders fields.

  Take up our quarrel with the foe:

  To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high.

  If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.

  Takes sip of water.

  Remember …

  “Had to memorize that whole goddamn poem in school, every fucking word of it,” said the playwright, back in the days when every classroom in Bannantyne elementary had a portrait of the Queen with the Union Jack flying from all the flagpoles and even the worst stutterer in class was compelled to stand up on Remembrance Day and muh-muh-mutter words like fu-fu-foe that made absolutely no sense to us.

  “Remember the Dead”?

  But how can we remember someone when we never met them and don’t even know their names?

  And what happens if we don’t remember them was a thought that kept me awake at nights.

  All those smelly dead people under my bed going to pull me down by the leg – down into the ground?

  Re-mem-ber …

  On the hundredth anniversary of the First World War …

  Re-mem-ber …

  The men and women of Verdun, Quebec, a community mothered, maimed, and murdered by war, a story told by someone we’re going to introduce you to tonight …

  PROJECTION

  Archival photo of women in the lunchroom of the British Munitions Supply (BMS) factory, titled “Women’s Lunch Room,” issued by British Munitions Supply Co. Ltd., Verdun, P.Q. [1916–1918]. Library and Archives Canada PA-024439.

  Recites.

  I see the same photograph in book after book

  and have learned to look for it

  yeah

  there it is again

  the photo with the caption

  “Women Factory Workers inside the British Munitions Supply Company lunchroom in Verdun, Quebec”

  where I grew up

  I look to see if I recognize any of them

  mothers wives lovers daughters sisters

  comrades and union mates

  all dressed the same

  in coveralls and dusters

  table after table of them

  in book after book

  same photo

  same blank looks

  like things on the shelf

  inventory

  that’s the way they want us

  to be remembered

  that’s the way they want us

  to remember ourselves

  sitting there ready to be used

  but there is one face

  with eyes that challenge

  this framing of our history

  someone startled and stunned

  into a bitter understanding

  by some bitter loss

  like the “labour militant” quoted

  in the Montreal Star

  July 14, 1917

  “Our men die overseas and our children starve because of the war profiteers. I’ve lost every relative except one.”

  Who is she? …

  Takes a pose as the character.

  Well, hello, she said.

  Waits for audience response.

  Hello? … Josephina Lillian Bradley, that’s my full name in case you’re wondering … my mother called me Lillian … thought Josephina sounded too French … but, Lilla
bit … that’s what I call myself … Lillabit … old enough now to remember when just about everything west of Church Avenue – now called de l’Église – was just bush until the big bops up in Westmount began shipping Protestants over here because they were worried that Montreal was becoming too much like Montréal … from places like Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast? … straight out of the Shankill Road … bad genetic pool … arriving at …

  Speaks as if voice is coming through a loudspeaker.

  “Track Number Nine” … in Windsor Station – now Gare Windsor – with my mother’s Presbyterian relatives there to greet us, already looking worried we might cost them money.

  And … “Well,” my uncle Edwin said – had a mouth like a cat’s asshole – “I suppose you’ve all had something to eat?”

  Mimes the cat’s asshole.

  Uncle Cheap Son of a Bitch … “See you at church” … Then getting on the Wellington 58 streetcar – clang-clang – over the buffalo bridge into – clang –

  Frowns.

  Oo-ooo! – clang – the smell of the Maple Leaf stockyards … in Pointe-Saint-Charles … “Da Pint” – clang – oooo-oo – clang – “That’s where the French and Irish Catholics live” …

  Singsong recitation.

  Protestant, Protestant, ring the bell,

  Catholic, Catholic, go to hell.

  Makes sound effects.

  Clang-clang – woo-oo … making the turn into Protestant Verdun where we settled into a four-and-a-half down on the Avenues – just like the one the playwright lived in with four sisters, a brother, a father who didn’t want to be there, and a mother who tried to get away … And for those of you from Ontario, the half is the toilet –

  Sits down and takes sip of water.

  Oh these cramped spaces they put us in – she said – “Hot in the summer … cold in the winter” – and how much light you get on the Avenues depending on whether you live in the Evens or the Odds … Evens you get light in the back room … Odds I get light in my front window … two hours in the summer between twelve and two … plants die in the winter and the birds …