Hell is Other Girls: Joan MacLeod's The Shape of a Girl

Hell is Other Girls: Joan MacLeod's The Shape ofa Girl SHELLEY SCOTT Fourteen-year-old Reena Virk stood out because of her physical appearance. "Tall and heavy, she towered over other girls her age," malured al an acceleraled pace, and was further cursed by developing facial hair. Considered unaltraclive , she was "largeled by bullies, [and] humiliated by her peers" (Tafter 16). In her quesl for acceptance, Reena Virk began hanging oUl al a neighbourhood park wilh a group of teenagers who were in foster care. She admired their freedom and picked up their vices, including smoking and, eventually, using heroin. The group of leenagers whom she thought were her friends would evenlually be her killers. While spending a Friday evening with her . family, she was called lo meel her friends at the nearby Wal-Mart and never returned. Eighl days laler, on Saturday, 2 2 November 1997, police spolled her body a few feet off a beach in Saanich, a suburb of Victoria, British Columbia. Police arresled eight suspects, all between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, all but one of them girls. In 1998, six of the girls were convicted of assault causing bodily hann and received sentences ranging from two months to a year. Warren Glowatski, eighteen, was convicted in 1999 and Kelly Ellard, seventeen, was convicted in 2000, both of second-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence (see Armstrong). Partly because of incidents such as this and partly because of a shifting social climate more generally, considerable anention is being paid to young girls in contemporary feminism. A good number of books published around the turn of the millennium attempt to address the complexities of feminist identity for young women, suggesting that girls have a wider array of possible identities and empowering identifications than ever before. I Yet we live in a time when there is a great deal of tension between the variety of role models available to girls, on the one hand, and the stullifying restrictions of a culture that still makes them unable to value and emulate any but the mosl conventional and conventionally beautiful of those models, on the other. For some Modern Drama. 45:2 (Summer2002) 270 Joan MacLeod's The Shape ofa Girl 271 unpopular and unconventional girls, it is possible to embrace distance from the ideal and to experiment with potential identities, to find a supportive alternative community, even to take pride in being a lone "body outlaw," to quote the title of Ophira Edut's inspirational collection for girls_' But for some misfit girls, the desire to conform is too desperate and the stakes are too high: belonging to a group, any group, and having an identity are one and the same. This vulnerability leads to bullying and violence by other girls.3 Joan MacLeod's 2001 play, The Shape ofa Girl, directly tackles the Reena Virk case and the issues that it raises. MacLeod is one of Canada's most important playwrights and her work has always paid attention to the social situation of female adolescents, particularly in her plays The Hope Slide, Little SiSler, and The Shape of a Girl. In fact, five of her seven published plays, which span the time period from 1985 to 2001 , feature a teenage girl.4 MacLeod explains, "I've always enjoyed writing about teenagers and the bigness of their emotions and how everything is so important to them. I think those same things back them into a comer sometimes and they feel isolated" (Clark B6). Theatre has the potential to act as a kind of public forum, to allow the playwright and audience a means by which to explore difficult current issues. Macleod creates characters who accurately reflect their real-life counterparts and their social milieu in a fictionalized microcosm and, most importantly , allows audience members to reflect on their own relationships with the larger implications of the subject matter. As Jerry Wasserman has said of MacLeod, "She vividly reconstructs [...J terror and loss, then tries to make sense of the experience and the lives affected by it, including her own" (7). There is always a sense in these plays that MacLeod is figuring out her own...