The Valley

By Joan MacLeod

Eighteen-year-old Connor, an aspiring author whose fantastical stories foretell his growing struggle with depression, can’t wait to be free of his adverb-wielding, solve-it-all mother, Sharon. But six weeks after leaving for university, he drops out and returns home.

Dan Mulano is an infatuated new dad and well-meaning police officer whose selfishness is veiled by the outward display of “principle” and the lofty aspirations he holds for his family. His wife, Janie, a former addict and exhausted new mom, struggles to cope with the challenges of recovery in the midst of her battle with postpartum depression, which Dan dismisses as “just hormones.”

A precipitous incident brings the two families together. When Connor’s erratic behaviour at an underground train station requires police intervention, Dan responds to the call and makes the arrest, but the teen’s jaw is broken during the incident. Is it police brutality or self-harm? For Sharon, there is no question; she portrays Dan as a reckless cop in the media, while he remains silent, refusing to break protocol and tell his story.
Inspired by an event in British Columbia that shattered the public’s confidence in the police – the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski during his arrest at the Vancouver airport – The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. In addressing this fraught relationship, award-winning playwright Joan MacLe­­od empathizes with both parties, each of whom is guided by good intentions but equally challenged by their own ­cultural biases and flawed humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228474

Joan MacLeod

Multiple Betty Mitchell, Chalmer’s, Dora ,and Governor General’s Award-winning author Joan MacLeod grew up in North Vancouver and studied Creative Writing at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. Now an internationally celebrated star of the world of the theatre, MacLeod developed her finely honed playwriting skills during seven seasons as playwright-in-residence at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. She turned her hand to opera with her libretto for The Secret Garden, which won a Dora Award. She has had many radio dramas produced by CBC Stereo Theatre, including Hand of God, a one-hour drama adapted from her play Jewel. She has also written numerous scripts for film and television productions. Translated into eight languages, her work has been extensively produced around the world. Multiple simultaneous productions of her hit play Shape of a Girl toured internationally for four years, including a sold-out run in New York. Her play Amigo’s Blue Guitar won the 1991 Governor General’s Drama Award. Her Governor General’s Award nominations include one in 1996 for The Hope Slide / Little Sister and one in 2009 for Another Home Invasion. Talon has also published her 2000, Gracie, The Valley, Toronto, Mississippi, and Homechild. MacLeod also writes prose and poetry, which has been published in a wide variety of literary journals. She also teaches Creative Writing at the University of Victoria.

Book preview

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Contents

Cover

Acknowledgements

Characters

Settings

Performance Note

Act One

Act Two

About the Playwright

The Valley premiered on March 6, 2013, at Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary, as part of the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, with the following cast and crew:

Connor: Zachary Dugan

Dan: Kyle Jespersen

Janie: Erin MacKinnon

Sharon: Esther Purves-Smith

Director : Linda Moore

Set, lighting, and projection designer : Scott Reid

Costume designer : April Viczko

Composer and sound designer : Jonathan Lewis

Fight director : Laryssa Yanchak

Stage manager : Johanne Deleeuw

Dramaturg : Laurel Green

Assistant set, lighting, and projection designer: Erin Gruber

Assistant stage manager : Oliver Armstrong

Assistant stage manager : Patti Neice

Assistant costume designer : Juli Elkiw

A revised version of The Valley opened on November 13, 2013, at ­Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, with the following cast and crew:

Connor : Colin Mercer

Dan : Ian Lake

Janie : Michelle Monteith

Sharon : Susan Coyne

Director : Richard Rose

Set and lighting designer : Graeme S. Thomson

Costume designer : Charlotte Dean

Composer and sound designer : Todd Charlton

Fight director : John Stead

Stage manager : Marie Fewer

Assistant director : Maria Milisavljevic

Apprentice stage manager : Robin Munro

Assistant set and lighting designer : Nick Andison

Acknowledgements

The first act of The Valley was written at the Stratford Festival’s 2010 Playwrights Retreat. Thank you, Bob White, for the invitation and support. The first complete draft was written and developed at the Banff Centre as part of the 2012 Playwrights Colony. This colony has been instrumental to the development of all my stage plays and once again I thank the centre profusely.

Thank you, Linda Moore, and the dedicated cast and crew at ­Alberta Theatre Projects, for contributing so much to the creation of this script; I am also indebted to Richard Rose and the cast and crew at Tarragon.

Thank you to my early readers – Daniel MacIvor, Don Hannah, Bill Gaston, Sally Stubbs, and psychiatric nurse Ingrid Currey.

Thank you to Constable Roger Reinson of the Calgary Police Service and to the Vancouver Police Department for its documentary series The Beat.

Thank you, Lorna Jackson, for lending me Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression – a phenomenal read that was instrumental in this play’s creation.

Thank you, Bill and Ana, once more, for letting me fly away from you too many times to work on this play.

Finally, thank you, Vicki Stroich, Vanessa Porteous, Dianne Goodman, and all the good folk at Alberta Theatre Projects who worked at the playRites Festival during the past twenty-eight years. It was a joy to be part of it every time.

Characters

Connor: eighteen years old

Dan: thirty years old, police officer

Janie: twenty-five years old, Dan’s wife

Sharon: fifty years old, Connor’s mother

Settings

Sharon and Connor’s house

Dan and Janie’s house

The police station

SkyTrain stations

Performance Note

In monologue and when directly addressing the audience, characters sometimes stand ninety degrees apart at points around the edge of an invisible circle. From here, characters also sometimes address one ­another, exchange a look, or share an action when bridging the end of one scene to the beginning of the next. These moments of connection are important.

Scenes in the first act take place in the past and build toward the SkyTrain incident. In the second act, they occur after the incident and build toward the healing circle at the end of the play. The healing circle exists in another reality or on another plane that is not rooted in the realism of the other scenes.

The play unfolds over eight months, from late August one year to late April the next. There should be a sense of fluid transition ­between scenes, back and forth between past to present, and from one location to another.

Act One

Lights up on CONNOR.

CONNOR

Encounters with the police, number one. I went to this party. There were hundreds of people there because the guy’s parents were away for the weekend. He’d moved most of the furniture out of the house and into the garage because he didn’t want anything to get wrecked. He was trying to be responsible. But when the cops showed up they didn’t even care. They still made everyone go home.

Number two. Sierra. We went to grad with each other because you had to go with whoever they said, so no one would feel left out. I didn’t know Sierra. At all. She was tall. She talked – a lot. She was