Beaver

By Claudia Dey

A northern Ontario gothic, Beaver follows Beatrice "Beaver" Jersey as she learns to grow beyond her circumscribed world, struggling with her whacky extended family, her alcoholic father, and her chain-smoking ghost of a mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770911598

Claudia Dey

CLAUDIA DEY is a novelist, playwright and columnist. Her plays have been produced internationally and include Beaver, Trout Stanley and The Gwendolyn Poems, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. Her debut novel, Stunt, was chosen by The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire as a Best Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Dey lives in Toronto and is co-owner and co-creator of the design label Horses Atelier.

Book preview

BEAVER

a play

Claudia Dey

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

For Alma.

Production History

Beaver premiered at the Factory Theatre in Toronto in March 2000, with the following cast and crew:

Directed by Sarah Stanley

Set and costume design by Troy Hansen

Lighting design by Leigh Ann Vardy

Music and sound by Marc Desormeaux

Dramaturged by Brian Quirt

Stage Management by Karen O’Brien

Produced by David Baile and Ken Gass

Excerpts from Beaver were first performed as part of the Rhubarb! Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto, in 1998 and 1999. The playwright acknowledges the assistance of the 1999 Banff playRites Colony (a partnership between the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Alberta Theatre Projects) in the development of this play. The playwright also wishes to thank Ken Gass, Brian Quirt, David Baile, and all of Factory Theatre.

Characters

BEATRICE/BEAVER JERSEY: Our heroine; age 12 in Act One, ages 11 and 17 in Act Two. Beatrice is somewhere after girl and before woman. She becomes Beaver.

ROSE JERSEY: Mother to Beaver, dead.

SILO: Father to Beaver, drowning, former talc mine employee.

COWBOY: Friend to Silo, talc mine employee.

EDNA JERSEY: Grandmother to Beaver; mother to Nora, Sima, and Rose.

NORA JERSEY: Aunt and guardian to Beaver, the eldest sister.

SIMA JERSEY: Aunt to Beaver, a dominatrix. (pronounced See-ma)

DORRIS DELISLO: Friend of the family. (pronounced De-lie-lo)

Setting/Music

The play takes place in Timmins, Ontario between a mother’s suicide and a daughter’s wedding. The landscapes are not literal, but half-constructed and mostly imagined: snowfields, summer rivers, highways, motels, kitchens, and graveyards. They create the ten-mile radius within which these people live—until the end, of course, when everything changes.

ACT

ONE

Scene One

Music: something hollow, so hollow, the wind might be fool enough to answer. January 20, 1988. Two days after ROSE Jersey’s suicide. Timmins, Ontario—three hundred miles from White River, Ontario, which is the proud record holder for the coldest temperature reached in Canada—set, of course, on this day. A graveyard. Blue white light: the colour of ice, somewhere between death and the sun. Timmins, despite its small population, has two graveyards: one for the rich and fallen with the requisite rifle salutes and pictorials; timber wives staring sunglassed into deep rectangles—there goes the bloodless bastard. The other graveyard sits on the shore of the Mattagami River—only a hop, skip, and a swig away from the Mattagami Inn and Strip Club—bring your leftover Kleenex and lose yourself in a lap dance. It is for those who were quiet about their contributions to the town; it is for the unaddressed, the repossessed, where the local police make speeches at the funeral because there are no relatives and this poor sod is more important than a speed trap. Epitaphs are part fiction and visitors are a miracle—is that the Lord himself?

BEATRICE enters alone. She wears her dead mother’s black clothes: a fur bomber jacket, a toque, a miniskirt and high-heeled boots. She is the only human figure amidst deep snowdrifts which lie like glass broken in patterns of neat despair. There are some deer prints, but no other winter records. BEATRICE stands by the gravesite: marked out, plotted with stakes and flagging tape. A new and independent territory—still empty. NORA, SIMA, and EDNA enter. They are in parkas, scarves, and toques—so wrapped up, mummified, that we cannot see their faces. They carry bags with alternate shoes.

NORA

(to BEATRICE) We thought we’d lost you. We didn’t. Good.

EDNA

You’re quick, like an ostrich.

NORA

Look out there.

EDNA

Nothing’s changed.

NORA

You can barely see the line of the river. Snowdrifts and ice everywhere.

NORA starts to sing with her soloist-in-the-choir voice. Beyond soprano.

SIMA

Stop showin’ off.

NORA stops singing.

NORA

I’m not.

SIMA

Y’are. Why’re we even here?

NORA

I felt like singing.

SIMA

Good for you. Jus’ seems slightly stupid to me to be singin’ if we can’t even bury her yet.

EDNA

She’s got a point.

NORA

Take her side. You always do.

EDNA

The ground is frozen.

NORA

Fine.

EDNA

It is.

NORA

Fine.

SIMA

If we have to wait till spring, then we’ll come back ’n sing in the goddamn spring. That way, you’ll have more time to practise.

NORA

Fine.

EDNA

Fine.

SIMA

Fine. As always everything in this family is jus’ fuckin’ fine.

EDNA

We should go.

SIMA

Yah, we should. Before I become jus’ another townie missin’ fingers.

NORA

It’s not my fault.

SIMA

Tell that to your boyfriend Jesus.

NORA

Curses.

SIMA

Christ.

EDNA

Quiet. Come on, after all, we are hostessing the party. Guests at last, Nora.

NORA

Guests at last.

EDNA

Let’s get a taxi.

SIMA

Let’s get drunk.

SIMA, EDNA, NORA, and BEATRICE walk away from the gravesite. Their boots break the snow. Their arms are crossed. Their heads are bent down, splitting the wind like meditative monks; faces frozen into reluctant smiles. Tasting salt. BEATRICE spins around and retraces her steps. A deserter, she returns to the gravesite; her keepsake.

BEATRICE

Bye-bye, ladies.

She looks back at the women becoming miniatures. They vanish into the distance which suddenly unfurls before her in the form of dusk; the point at which you recognize the day is gone; your mother is gone. BEATRICE looks around—a wasteland. The wind plays with her scarf, her face. She digs her heels into the ground. It does not give way.