My Family and Other Endangered Species

By Ellen Close and Braden Griffiths

Nine-year-old Phineas interprets the world through his encyclopedic knowledge of animals, but some human behaviour is just too puzzling. Take for example his mom, who insists he learn to fall asleep on his own, even though all young mammals sleep with their mothers; or his dad, who recently picked up and left the family, a behaviour quite unlike other mate-for-life animals. And then there’s the constant news from his favourite TV station, the Green Channel, about how humans are ruining the environment, a fact Phin is growing increasingly anxious about. So when his fourth-grade class gets a White’s tree frog as a pet, all of Phin’s anxieties come to a boil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781770915213

Ellen Close

Ellen Close is a playwright, actor, and director in Calgary. Her new work with her collaborator Braden Griffiths, Cipher, was commissioned by Vertigo Theatre and recently won the Alberta Playwriting Competition.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Foreword By Alanna Mitchell

Production History

Characters

ACT ONE

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

Scene Four

Scene Five

Scene Six

Scene Seven

Scene Eight

Scene Nine

Scene Ten

Scene Eleven

Scene Twelve

Scene Thirteen

Scene Fourteen

Scene Fifteen

Scene Sixteen

Scene Seventeen

Scene Eighteen

Scene Nineteen

ACT TWO

Scene Twenty

Scene Twenty-One

Scene Twenty-Two

Scene Twenty-Three

Scene Twenty-Four

Scene Twenty-Five

Scene Twenty-Six

Scene Twenty-Seven

Scene Twenty-Eight

Scene Twenty-Nine

Scene Thirty

Scene Thirty-One

Scene Thirty-Two

Scene Thirty-Three

Scene Thirty-Four

Scene Thirty-Five

Scene Thirty-Six

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

For Maggie.

—E

For my parents.

—B

FOREWORD

BY ALANNA MITCHELL

Ideas hop around, leaping from person to person, across time and place and space, sprinting from one brain to another over air and radio waves, cables, satellites, musical notes, and even the written word.

And, of course, they morph as they go, shifting in emphasis and meaning as they skitter about.

Take this play, for example. It’s adapted from the widely praised first novel by Carla Gunn, Amphibian. So, a play from a novel. But its roots are also complexly intertwined with many other phenomena. For example, this play has a kinship—so Ellen Close tells me—with a round of research and writing I did as a journalist that ended up becoming my book Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis. So, me, trekking around the world quizzing scientists and then turning those ideas into a work of non-fiction.

But then my book became a bunch of lectures whose ideas inspired Franco Boni and Ravi Jain of the Theatre Centre in Toronto, and together the three of us metamorphosed the book and the lectures and a whole raft of other ideas into the play Sea Sick, which Ellen saw. Somehow Gunn’s book and my adventures as a journalist and Phin’s odyssey in this play did a dance together in Ellen’s brain—along with, no doubt, many other influences—as she and Braden Griffiths made something wholly new.

Some might put this down merely to the phenomenon of multidisciplinarianism. And some might be seduced into thinking that this play, or Gunn’s novel, or my book and talks and play, are about the environmental crisis on our planet.

I think they are about something even more important. They are about the power of curiosity. About the immense human need to understand, to explain, to seek answers, to imagine. They are about the primordial need for narrative, for home, for a way to describe the world.

They are, at base, about honouring mystery and then somehow figuring out how to put that idea out there for others to play with and pass along in whatever ways they can.

Alanna Mitchell is a Canadian journalist, author, and playwright. With help, she turned her award-winning book Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis into a one-woman play that she has performed across Canada and internationally. It was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 2014. Her latest book, Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths, came out in September 2015 and she is at work on her fifth book and next play.

My Family and Other Endangered Species was first produced by Downstage at the Big Secret Theatre in Calgary from April 23 to May 3, 2014. It featured the following cast and creative team:

The play was remounted as part of Vertigo’s Y Stage Theatre Series at the Vertigo Studio in Calgary from January 28 to February 7, 2016.

CHARACTERS

The show is written to be performed by two actors, one male and one female, who both play Phineas Walsh, a nine-year-old boy.

Phin 1 also plays:

Mrs. Wardman

Bird

Dr. Barrett

The Leader

Phin 2 also plays:

Mom

Rena

Kaitlyn

Gordon

The Scientist

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

Bedroom. PHIN is drawing in a sketchbook.

PHIN

1 & 2

A pain mark is lots of different shades of red.

PHIN 1

When pain is small—like when you’re hungry but not so hungry you would eat broccoli—the mark is small, like a dot on a page and pinkish red. But when pain is huge, the mark is huge and very dark shades of red.

We see a globe glowing red from within—the pain mark of the planet of Reull.

The pain mark of the planet of Reull is a very dark shade of red. This planet is home to millions of different species. These creatures live in harmony together, each one