No White Picket Fence: A Verbatim Play about Young Women’s Resilience through Foster Care

By Robin C. Whittaker and Sue Mckenzie-Mohr

A powerful verbatim play about young women’s resilience through foster care, drawn from in-depth interviews. No White Picket Fence stems from a research project conducted by social work professor Sue McKenzie-Mohr with ten individuals who, as girls, grew up in the foster-care system and now identify in their own ways as living well. The play’s dialogue is entirely verbatim, lending the play its hyperreal feel, and giving voice to typically marginalized perspectives from those at the heart of the youth-in-care system. No White Picket Fence follows the women’s unique stories in their own words, from their experiences before being taken into care through their time in the system and on into their current lives navigating the world as young adults. Their stories are raw, characterized by times of turmoil and suffering in their original family homes and later during impermanent arrangements in foster care and group homes. And yet these women’s stories also highlight their persistent efforts to move toward living well on their own terms.

Above all, these are stories about resistance, resilience, and the enduring strength of the human spirit. No White Picket Fence sheds light on the urgent need for greater and sustained efforts to improve a care system that struggles to meet the basic needs of the youth it is mandated to protect and nurture. The voices in No White Picket Fence tell stories that need to be heard, stories we all need to hear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781772012996

Robin C. Whittaker

Robin C. Whittaker teaches, directs, writes, and creates theatre with students at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick where he is Associate Professor and Drama Advisor in the Department of English and Artistic Producer and Faculty Advisor for Theatre St. Thomas. He holds a doctorate in drama from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies; a masters in drama from the University of Alberta; and an honours bachelor of arts in English and Theatre from Wilfrid Laurier University. At St. Thomas University he teaches courses in directing, acting, theatre theory and criticism, and dramatic literature and has supervised students in the fields of Canadian theatre and marginalization, scriptwriting, and stage management. He has written plays produced at universities and Fringe festivals in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Waterloo, and Fredericton and directed several maritime premieres for Theatre St. Thomas, including Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Coronation Voyage, Michael Hollingworth’s Trudeau and the FLQ, and the world premiere of No White Picket Fence. He currently serves as Vice President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR). He is editor of the new play anthology Hot Thespian Action: Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (2009 AUP), and contributed the Forward to Sally Clark’s WANTED (Talonbooks 2004). He is the founding editor of STU Reviews, Fredericton’s only ongoing theatre reviewing website. Robin has written articles on a range of Canadian theatre topics, many of which are related to nonprofessionalizing (community or amateur) theatre in the “professional era”; these are found in journals such as Theatre Research in Canada and Canadian Theatre Review.

Book preview

A navy blue cover with four thin white line drawings of rectangular homes that look like apartment towers with lit up windows. On two of the homes, young women sit with a meek posture.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Foreword: Fashioning Truth to Think Otherwise

Verbatim Theatre, Youth in Care, Social Action

Production History

Characters

Pre-Show

Scene 1: Meeting Emily

Scene 2: Living Well (Pt. I)

Scene 3: Amanda’s Journey

Scene 4: Meeting Lotus

Scene 5: Catalysts

Scene 6: Emma is Around Six

Scene 7: Lisa Asks, Why Don’t they Take Him Away?

Scene 8: Amanda’s Beautiful House

Scene 9: Alisha Sees A Difference

Scene 10: Kris’s Mom is Very Ill

Scene 11: Mary Isn’t Adopted

Scene 12: Brooklyn is Hospitalized

Scene 13: Lotus is Prescribed Dexedrine

Scene 14: Kari’s Cats (Pt. I)

Scene 15: Emily (PT. I)

Scene 16: Lisa’s Garbage Bag

Scene 17: Mary’s Being Watched

Scene 18: Brooklyn Does the Opposite

Scene 19: Things Don’t Work Out with Kris’s Aunt Brenda

Scene 20: Kari’s Cats (Pt. II)

Scene 21: Lotus Joins Athletics

Scene 22: Emily (Pt. II)

Scene 23: Lisa at the Bridge

Scene 24: Mary’s Dream

Scene 25: Emma’s Punishments

Scene 26: Lotus’s Friend Plays AccordÉOn and It’s Past Our Bedtime

Scene 27: Everyone Drinks at University, Amanda

Scene 28: Alisha Makes her Own Pieces

Scene 29: Emily (Pt. III)

Scene 30: Lotus Detoxes

Scene 31: Kris’s Coat

Scene 32: Amanda’s Finding Roots

Scene 33: Living Well (Pt. II)

Scene 34: Reflections

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Page List

Cover

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Landmarks

Cover

Title Page

Scene 1: Meeting Emily

Thank you for purchasing and reading No White Picket Fence.

If you came across this ebook by some other means, feel free to purchase it and support our hard work. It is available through most major online ebook retailers and on our website. The print edition is also available.

Talonbooks is a small, independent, Canadian book publishing company. We have been publishing works of the highest literary merit since the 1960s. With more than 500 books in print, we offer drama, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by local playwrights, poets, and authors from the mainstream and margins of Canada’s three founding nations, as well as both visible and invisible minorities within Canada’s cultural mosaic. Learn more about us or about the playwrights, Robin Whittaker and Sue McKenzie-Mohr.

NO WHITE PICKET FENCE

A Verbatim Play About Young Women's

Resilience Through Foster Care

Robin C. Whittaker

and Suzanne McKenzie-Mohr

Talonbooks

Talonbooks logo

For those who have had challenging experiences before, during, and following their time as Youth in Care, and yet have persisted in their efforts to live well.

In particular, for the ten young women who trusted us with their rich and complex accounts and collaborated with us in preparing this play. They have our gratitude and deep respect.

This play includes stories featuring emotional and violent experiences.

Audience and reader discretion is advised.

FOREWORD: FASHIONING TRUTH TO THINK OTHERWISE

by Kathleen Gallagher

ATTICUS (male, Native and Nigerian, middle class, straight, believes in God, first language English, other language Ojibway)¹: Um, verbatim is unlike other ones, it’s more natural, more organic, more personal. And it’s more different than other plays that are out there, and it’s just more organic.

SCOTT (male, white, research assistant): Organic. What do you mean by that?

ATTICUS: Like it’s, I don’t know, it hasn’t been tweaked, it hasn’t been, like, touched, like it’s untouched, it’s natural. It’s more from the heart than it is from, like, the mind.

Atticus is a young person in my current ethnographic research project, which uses verbatim theatre as a creative and research methodology. In this exchange, he is being invited to reflect on his experience of making a verbatim play with his drama classmates. His answer points both to the presumed techniques of the form (it hasn’t been tweaked) and the kind of communication it initiates (It’s more from the heart than it is from, like, the mind). For this young theatre-maker, it is a value to keep things in their original form, untouched. He further characterizes verbatim theatre as a communication from the heart, as a feeling project rather than an analytical one.

Playwright Andrew Kushnir defines verbatim theatre modestly:

Documentary or verbatim theatre involves dramatizing text that has been crafted from interview transcripts or the carefully tran scribed footage of real-life encounters and events. It produces a fictional non-fiction experience in the theatre wherein the actual words of often-underrepresented voices (or historically misrepresented voices) take the stage.²

A fictional non-fiction experience is a novel way to think about live theatre. Verbatim is indeed a fictional experience of a real or non-fiction world. Yet my research tells me, interestingly, that at its point of reception, audience members often feel that this fiction is more real than reality. Mya Ibrahim (female, Somali, heterosexual, middle class, Muslim, first language English, other languages Somali and Arabic), a classmate of Atticus’s, says assuredly: It’s more real, but it’s not real.

How can something be more real but not real? What work is verbatim theatre doing when its created world evokes a communication more real than real life? David Hare, one of verbatim’s fiercest proponents in its early days, believed it was communicating real life to us better than those appointed to do so, journalists and news reporters. He believed that journalism produced life with the mystery taken out whereas art created life with the mystery restored. He argued further that there was a hunger for the fullness and complexity of reality that journalists themselves were failing to deliver on. That very idea, though, also made verbatim theatre suspect in its early days; had it sacrificed aesthetic expression and found itself caged by reality? Hare disagreed:

Particular objection is made to the use of other people’s dialogue. No sooner had a genre called verbatim drama been identified than sceptics appeared arguing that it was somehow unacceptable to copy dialogue down, rather than to make it up. People who did this, it was said, are called journalists, not artists. But anyone who gives verbatim theatre a moment’s thought – or rather, a dog’s chance – will conclude that the matter is not as simple as it first looks.³

Today, one might find verbatim theatre tethered to various forms of research across a range of disciplines, where researchers aspire for their work to reach a wider audience or to communicate in voices beyond scholarly ones. No White Picket Fence speaks to such a collaboration between its creators.

Whether verbatim theatre is built from scholarly research, a playwright’s own observations and interactions, popular culture, or the news cycle, complex ethical, social, and artistic questions converge at the nucleus of