“True When No One Would Listen”: Scripts for Young Readers and Young Audiences

Playscripts present the vision of the playwright, while simultaneously opening spaces for multiple voices to tell stories their own ways. Since characters in a playscript are meant to be embodied, they immediately invite interpretation. And since scripts rarely, if ever, answer all the questions a reader, actor, director, or educator may have, they encourage complex ways of listening and having conversations. Selfie by Christine Quintana, A Bear Awake in Winter by Ali Joy Richardson, and Winky & Stinky by Curtis Peeteetuce are all recently published scripts that engage with some similar issues: consent, agency, voice and choice, bodily autonomy, gendered expectations, and controlling your own narrative. Selfie, published by Playwrights Canada Press as a standalone script, was first performed in English in 2018 (Young People’s Theatre Toronto), and in French in 2015 (Théâtre la Seixième in Vancouver). A Bear Awake in Winter was first workshopped in 2018 (Canadian Stage Toronto) and produced by Binocular Theatre in 2019 in Toronto. Finally, Winky and Stinky is part of Boca del Lupo’s pandemic project Plays2Perform@Home, which features five box sets containing four scripts each: British Columbia, Prairie, Ontario, Québec, and Eastern Canada. Winky and Stinky is part of the Prairie Box Set and was created with support from Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon.

The issues these scripts explore are “real” while the content is fiction. Yet sometimes, as Kathleen Gallagher notes when discussing documentary theatre techniques with youth, “fiction makes it more real” (Gallagher, Mealey, and Jacobson 72) and, as Jenn Stephenson observes, even in hyperreal and immersive performance contexts, truly profound moments happen when “the audience experience turns inward, reversing the gaze so that the remaining real is the self-reflexive affect of [their] own emotions and visceral responses” (4). When a person comes to the play as a performer, a director, a reader, or an audience member, the voices they hear and the ones they bring themselves, are bound to influence the conversations, the listening, and ultimately, the “remaining real” response to the play. The plays I review here could be at the heart of thought-provoking productions by young people, families, or professionals. They are also great to read. Regardless of whether someone encounters Selfie, A Bear Awake in Winter, or Winky & Stinky as audience members, actors, directors, or readers, in this review I encourage a viewpoint that acknowledges the multiple voices that ideally contribute to a play experience.

Selfie explores a story about three teens: “thoughtful and intuitive” sixteen-year-old Emma; Emma’s best friend Lily, who has a “big heart and big mouth”; and seventeen-year-old Chris, Lily’s older brother, who is “a good guy” (1). The intentionally likeable characters, who also care deeply about one another, make the stakes of each scene higher as they make choices that unravel their relationships and possible futures. The story features an alcohol-fuelled high school party while the parents are out of town, an (apparently) long overdue hook up between Chris and Emma, the rest of the house party which Emma cannot remember, and the fallout in the days after. One undercurrent in the play relates to self-representation and taking charge of one’s own narrative. In the first lines of the play, Lily claims that there are three versions of each person: the one everyone sees, the one they wish they were, and the one they really are, “whatever that means” (3). At the end of the scene, she tells the audience: “[I]n the end, it doesn’t matter who you really are. What matters is what everyone gets to see” (6). It becomes clear that in a play that addresses social media, Instagram...