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    Motherhouse
    Motherhouse
    Motherhouse
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Motherhouse

    By David Fennario

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    About this ebook

    From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.

    In 1915, with tensions running high across the country over conscription and linguistic and religious issues, dedicated mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts assemble artillery shells to support the war effort and inadvertently find themselves assembled to bring about change both in their working conditions and in their personal lives. Meanwhile, their beloved soldiers die on battlefields overseas while their children starve at home because of war profiteering. Verdun’s munitions manufacturer employed more than four thousand women during the war, including Fennario’s mother. Tragically, the city of Verdun sacrificed more soldiers to both World Wars than any other place in Canada.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateMay 15, 2014
    ISBN9780889228498
    Motherhouse
    Author

    David Fennario

    Anglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the centre of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a housepainter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy-O.” David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Duplessis’ Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed and compressed. “School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I’ve been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.”

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      Book preview

      Motherhouse - David Fennario

      Motherhouse-Cover-EPub.jpg

      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?

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