Paradise

By Patti Flather

After a traumatic assault in Central America, Rachel returns home, but it isn’t the reprieve she expected. She comes back to turmoil between her parents, and a part-time job in her dad’s medical office. Her father, George, full of endearing blunder, tries unsuccessfully to connect with his daughter, who seems to be reeling. Her childhood friend Khalil isn’t around to provide support. He’s in Afghanistan travelling and volunteering when he is wrongfully arrested. On the periphery is Wally—off work because of a logging injury—who spends a great deal of time in George’s office. Wally struggles to buy food for his dog Lucky, his rent payments are overdue, and the ringing in his ears just won’t stop. He’s looking for help in all the right places, but nobody seems to notice he’s deteriorating until it’s too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770917606

Patti Flather

Patti Flather (www.pattiflather.com) is an award-winning Yukon playwright, theatre artist, writer, and cultural producer. Paradise toured nationally; a scene is featured in Refractions: Scenes. Her first fiction collection is Such A Lovely Afternoon (Inanna). Other plays include Sixty Below, West Edmonton Mall, Where the River Meets the Sea, and Street Signs (formerly The Soul Menders). She’s among the co-creators of the Ndoo Tr’eedyaa Gogwaandak—Vuntut Gwitchin Stories radio plays in Gwich’in and English. Flather co-founded Gwaandak Theatre, which celebrates Indigenous and Northern theatre stories, and worked twenty years there. A recipient of the Borealis Prize, she has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Flather is grateful to live on Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council territory in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Production History

Characters

Overture

Myths and Legends

Alone

How You Dance

Letters

Green-Breasted Mango

Appeal Denied

Change the World

Can’t Get Clean

Those Bushes Are High

Inside the Barn

Coming Home

It’s About My Bus Pass

Ear Canals

Tough Old Bitch

Who’s Dr. Pierce?

Dogs Listen

Yellow-Rumped Warbler

Cheese Slices and Fat

Dogs are Dirty

Tighten Our Belts / Moving On

Tell You Anything

A Good Sign

Best Cleaner

Bus Pass

Luscious Linda

Round and Round the Tree

Good Little Truck

Interrogations

Bad Doctor

It’s Empty Here

Special Ear Guy

Had It With Doctors

The Guns Are Back

Are You Addicted?

Truth

Get Me On the Table

I’ll Find You

Shedding

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Paradise is dedicated to the memory of my father, Verne D. Flather, 1937–1992, who loved to play.

Preface

Paradise is a play that is close to my heart, my story. My family has lived with mental health and addictions issues for many years. In 1992 my father, a family doctor, was murdered on the street outside his home by a former patient with undiagnosed mental illness.

I began to write, struggling to transcend the personal, in an exploration of human rights, mental illness, addictions, and our own personal complicity in these urgent issues that surround us daily. I didn’t know what I was writing. Only that I was writing in response to personal experiences, and experiences I had only heard about over immense distances of time and space, which haunted me. Paradise covers such distances in the beat and flutter of a bird’s wing.

This approach presented many challenges, as did the scope, with multiple complex stories emerging as I wrote. Would some be shortchanged? Together with my friend and dramaturg DD Kugler, whose support has been invaluable, we wondered how Paradise would even be staged. DD said these questions could only be answered in the rehearsal hall. Enter MT Space, founded by Majdi Bou-Matar, who were touring their stunning show Body 13 to Whitehorse. This incredibly talented ensemble does not usually begin with text. They are committed to intercultural work that speaks to Canada today. We invited them to stage the impossible with us at Gwaandak Theatre in a workshop—a scene happening simultaneously in two different parts of the world. It worked. And a rich new artistic relationship has developed, which I am utterly grateful for.

My hope, in sharing Paradise, is that we embrace the parts of ourselves, and our worlds, that are difficult. We live in desperate times. Many of us struggle to maintain our mental health and get by each day, let alone connect meaningfully in our communities. We have a housing emergency, people going hungry, women and girls sexually assaulted, people tortured. We live in a climate of fear: crime, radicalization, terror. We need the beauty of a bird in flight, soaring, landing.

Production History

Paradise premiered at the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon, in March 2015 as a production of Gwaandak Theatre and MT Space, in association with the Yukon Arts Centre, with the following cast and creative team:

Khalil: Aldrin Bundoc

Wally: Nicholas Cumming

Rachel: Pam Patel

George: Michael Peng

Director: Majdi Bou-Matar

Stage Manager: Emily Farrell

Set & Properties / Lighting Design: David Skelton

Composer & Sound Design: Jordy Walker

Costume Design: Melaina Sheldon

Technical Director / Tour Technician: Bronwyn Bowlby

Dramaturgy: DD Kugler

Production Manager: Vanessa White

Managing Artistic Director: Patti Flather

General Manager and Marketing Director: Marjolène Gauthier

This production of Paradise was presented at MT Space’s IMPACT festival in Kitchener, Ontario, from September 26 to October 4, 2015, with lighting design by Jenny Jimenez.

MT Space held a three-week development workshop for Paradise in the fall of 2014 in Kitchener, Ontario, and included a public presentation on December 6 at the Courtyard at Bonnie