St. Francis of Millbrook

By Sky Gilbert

Being a teenager is hard, especially if you're questioning your sexuality and growing up in rural Ontario in the mid '90s. Add to that a temperamental, homophobic father and a tenacious love for Madonna, and it's almost unbearable. Despite it all, Luke loves working on the family farm, and at least he has the support of a group of local outsiders who invite him into their circle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781770912687

Sky Gilbert

Sky Gilbert is a writer, theatre director, and drag queen extraordinaire. He was the founding artistic director (1979 to 1997) of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre—one of the world’s longest-running gay and lesbian theatres. There is a street in Toronto named after him—Sky Gilbert Lane (you can google it!). He has had more than forty plays produced and has written seven critically acclaimed novels and three poetry collections. He has received three Dora Mavor Moore Awards, the Pauline McGibbon Award, and the Silver Ticket Award. His latest novel, Sad Old Faggot (ECW Press), was critically acclaimed. His book Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry was the World will be published by Guernica Editions in 2020. He lives in Hamilton.

Book preview

St. Francis of Millbrook

Sky Gilbert

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

Contents

Preface

Production History

Characters

Time

Setting

Act One

Act Two

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Dedication

Also by Sky Gilbert

Copyright

Preface

In 2010 Kim Blackwell and Robert Winslow of 4th Line Theatre approached me to write a play about being gay in the country. They sent me newspaper articles from the 1960s about a series of murders of young gay men that had occurred in the Peterborough area. I found these stories fascinating but also very sad. I was excited about the opportunity to write on the subject, but I wanted to write a piece that was ultimately celebratory, not tragic.

As I have never lived in the country (although I was born in a very small town in Connecticut, and my mother’s father was a farmer), Kim suggested I might interview several gay men around my age who had grown up on farms in the Peterborough area. The resulting interviews were interesting but not inspiring; it was not until I talked with Shane MacKinnon that I discovered the spark for the play that would become St. Francis of Millbrook. I have known Shane—an actor, DJ, and exotic dancer in his thirties—for a number of years, having produced a twenty-minute play he had written many years ago that was presented at Buddies’ Rhubarb! Festival. The play focused on the fraught relationship between Shane and his farmer father, and Shane acted in the production himself with one other actor. When I interviewed Shane in 2011 for St. Francis of Millbrook, I once again heard all of the passion and frustration that he felt about being gay and growing up on a farm in southeastern Ontario. Many of the details we discussed stuck in my mind—Shane’s love for Madonna, his close relationship with his MOM, and his friendship with tolerant local hippies who invited him to a moon dance.

So I wrote the play. With lots of suggestions from Kim Blackwell—and going through many drafts as well!

It’s important to remember that as inspired as I was by Shane’s personal story, it was also enthralling to have the opportunity to write a play for 4th Line. I have always admired Robert Winslow. Like me, Robert founded a theatre that was devoted to Canadian work and aimed at a specific community. But it thrilled me to write not for a large, urban, trendy, politically correct audience (as I usually do) but for a small working-class community that might be challenged or at the very least surprised to see a play with significant gay content. Also (and much more fundamentally) I was excited in a theatrical sense. 4th Line Theatre is one of the few theatres in Canada that works with a very large cast comprised of both professional actors and community-based amateurs. I knew that I would be writing for thirty people with wide-ranging acting skills. And on top of that, the play would take place outdoors! Both Kim and Robert mentioned that if I could figure out a way to use a horse in the story, that would be great!

I’d never worked under these conditions before. I’d always written for small casts of professional actors, and of course for indoor venues. When I first saw the plays at 4th Line I was terribly excited by the electricity that passed between spectators and performers. The audience love this theatre and are passionately engaged in the material, which more often than not features political and/or historical content. I was also excited by the possibilities of using sunsets, grass, space, and animals as a vital component of the mise en scène.

St. Francis of Millbrook was performed in the summer of 2012 and was quite a success with audiences. I had several queries after the play closed about the possibility of obtaining a script for performance. I hesitated only because the script I had written was tailored for 4th Line, so it necessarily had a large cast and was set outdoors. Necessarily, the result of these questions is the draft you see before you. It’s a version of the original script (in fact nearly the same as the original) in which various Brechtian solutions are employed to bring the cast numbers down (doubling, casting some characters as cardboard cut-outs), and a live horse is not required!

I think I have managed to remain faithful to the 4th Line play text, but have also provide a script that can be performed by any theatre company. Of course, if there is a producer out there who has thirty performers and a farm, the play can be performed that way too!

I’m hoping that, one way or the other, Luke may have a chance at a further life.

We’ll see.

—Sky Gilbert, summer 2014

St. Francis of Millbrook was first produced by 4th Line Theatre at the Winslow Farm in Millbrook, Ontario, from August 13 to September 1, 2012. It featured the following cast and creative team:

Characters

Luke