Controlled Damage

By Andrea Scott

Controlled Damage explores the life of Canadian civil rights icon Viola Desmond and how her act of bravery in a Nova Scotia movie theatre in 1946 started a ripple effect that is still felt today. An ordinary woman forced to be extraordinary by an unyielding and racist world, Desmond never gave up -- despite the personal cost to her and those who loved her. Andrea Scott's highly theatrical examination of Desmond and her legacy traces the impact that she had on our culture, but also casts light on the slow progress of the fight for social justice and civil rights in Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scirocco Drama
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927922712

Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott’s play Eating Pomegranates Naked won the RBC Arts Professional Award and was named Outstanding Production at the 2013 SummerWorks Festival. Better Angels: A Parable won the SummerWorks Award for Outstanding Production. Both were published by Scirocco Drama in 2018. Don’t Talk to Me Like I’m Your Wife, which won the Cayle Chernin Award for theatre, ran at SummerWorks in 2016. 2019 saw her co-written play with Nick Green, Every Day She Rose wow audiences at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Her play about Viola Desmond, Controlled Damage, had its sold-out world premiere at Neptune Theatre in 2020 and will open at the Grand Theatre in 2022. She won the Magee Diversity Screenwriter’s Award for her first TV script, Dust to Dust. Her dark comedy Bad Habits landed her a job in the all Black writer’s room of The Porter (BET/CBC) which she followed up with snagging a spot pitching to Netflix with her supernatural drama Cassidy Must Die. 2021 saw her winning $10,000 from Amazon and the Indigenous Screen Office, pitching her coming-of-age dramedy DONE! She’s currently working in the writer’s room on the fifteenth season of Murdoch Mysteries while co-creating a one-hour drama for Sienna Films. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

ACT ONE

The Girl Who Lived

Multiple spotlights highlight the chorus.

CHARACTER A: Like two birds in a cock-fight. Neither one of them would, or could, move out of the way fast enough.

CHARACTER E: One Norwegian, the other French, squeezed into the Chebucto –

SISI: K’jipuktuk

CHARACTER E: Or what white people called Halifax Harbour, which was already very narrow.

CHARACTER F: The French didn’t raise their red warning flag to tell the other ship they were carrying dangerous cargo and the Norwegians just pushed out into the harbour without getting the official okay.

GWEN: Children. They behaved like children. I should know, I had fifteen of them.

JAMES: Viola had just fallen asleep in her high chair in the kitchen.

CHARACTER E: Nobody knew it then, but the French ship was full of TNT, benzol, and piric.

CHARACTER F: And when those two big ships bumped into each other –

GWEN: I hadn’t been away from my girls and I already missed their faces.

CHARACTER G: The benzol leaked onto the deck –

CHARACTER H: There were sparks from the scraping, torn metal –

CHARACTER A: And the barrels of benzol

CHARACTER E: Barrels of