Quiver

By Anna Chatterton

“She doesn’t care about me; she doesn’t even want to see me; she just pretends she does.”

Shy, fourteen-year-old Maddie wasn’t expecting to have to worry about taking care of herself just yet. Her sixteen-year-old party-girl sister Bea has scandalously moved in with their mom’s ex-boyfriend, and in turn their brassy mother Sheila has run straight to the comfort of another lover. Maddie is finding that an empty apartment is quiet and lonely, even though her time is normally spent reading comics in her closet. Feeling abandoned and vulnerable, she turns to her favourite superhero, Arrowette. Armed with a backpack filled with a bow and arrows, she embarks on a radical plan to join the army, where she thinks she will find a new family she can count on.

Meanwhile, Bea is second-guessing the whole dating an older man thing, and Sheila defends her unorthodox sexual candour, entertaining the ideals of freedom. When Bea and Sheila decide to come home for Maddie’s birthday, they’re faced with the pointed arrow of Maddie’s newfound power and the startling reality of the kind of family they’ve become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770919433

Anna Chatterton

Anna Chatterton is a librettist, playwright, and performer. She is a two-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama—in 2018 for her play Gertrude and Alice (co-written with Evalyn Parry), and in 2017 for her play Within the Glass. Her solo play Quiver was a finalist for the 2019 Hamilton Literary Awards in Fiction. Anna's plays have been produced by the Shaw Festival, Nightwood Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, and Alberta Theatre Projects, among others. Anna has been a playwright-in-residence at Nightwood Theatre, the National Theatre School of Canada, Tarragon Theatre, and Tapestry Opera. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Book preview

9781770919419.jpg

Also by Anna Chatterton

Gertrude and Alice (with Evalyn Parry and Karin Randoja)

Within the Glass

QUIVER

By Anna Chatterton

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

Quiver © Copyright

2018

by Anna Chatterton

First edition: November

2018

Cover art and design by Evan Munday

Playwrights Canada Press

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:: [e-mail] :: www.playwrightscanada.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca.

For professional or amateur production rights, please contact Playwrights Canada Press.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Chatterton, Anna, author

          Quiver / Anna Chatterton. -- First edition.

A play.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

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Playwrights Canada Press acknowledges that we operate on land which, for thousands of years, has been the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, Métis and Haudenosaunee peoples. Today, this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and play here.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts — which last year invested $

153

million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country — the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Ontario Media Development Corporation and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

For Sketti,

Love George.

For Elizabeth Chatterton

And for Jim Ruxton

Contents

Preface

Production History

Characters

Quiver

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Landmarks

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

Preface

Quiver

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Page List

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Preface

This story is inspired by my teenage self and the dynamics in our single parent family. For a period of time as a teenager I was often home alone in our apartment. I remember a lot of silence, coming home to silence, waking up to silence. I have a particular memory of noting that my shoes were always in the same place I had taken them off, as if I wanted someone to straighten them out, put them away. For some teenagers, being home alone so much would have been heaven. Those teens would have had parties every weekend, drank, smoked joints, ordered pizza and had sleepovers with their boyfriends. Not I.

Often I slept at my best friend Andrea’s, where there was a pool, a karaoke machine, so much food in her fridge and cupboards and a mother