David William Fennario is a Canadian playwright, best known for Balconville (1979), his bilingual dramatization of life in working-class Montreal, for which he won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award. He has been the subject of two National Film Board of Canada documentaries, David Fennario's Banana Boots and Fennario: His World On Stage.
Background
David Fennario was born David William Wiper, on April 26, 1947, in Verdun, Quebec, Canada; son of James (a house painter) and Margaret (Kerr) Wiper. He grew up in Pointe-Ste-Charles, an anglophone working-class area in Montréal. “In this subculture, he learned to be streetwise in a city divided between French and English factions and further stressed by an increasingly obvious and vocal ethnic mosaic,” explained Reid Gilbert in Contemporary Dramatists.
He changed his name as a young adult to “Fennario” after a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy- O.”
Education
David enrolled in Montréal's Dawson College, where his creative writing teacher arranged a private publication of his journal entries on life in "The Pointe," which eventually became Without a Parachute (1972).
Career
David Fennario lived in Toronto in the mid-1960s during its counterculture heyday, when it was home to a large population of American draft-dodgers, and he was even jailed for a month on vagrancy charges. In 1969 he took a job in a dress factory in Montreal as a packer and shipper.
His early Without a Parachute brought Fennario sudden success upon publication in 1972. Though he had never seen a live theater performance until that point, Fennario quickly wrote his first play, On the Job, based on his experiences in the dress factory a few years before. On the Job was a hit in Montreal, enjoyed success in other Canadian cities as well, was filmed for television, and even translated into a French-language version. “Fennario has an ear for the dialects of Montreal, and in large part, the accurate, powerful vernacular accounts for his early local success,” wrote Gilbert.
November of 1976 saw the debut of Fennario’s second play at the Centaur, Nothing to Lose. For a time Fennario relocated to Canada’s largest city and wrote his 1978 stage work, Toronto, there.
Fennario’s next play Balconville was a great success in Montreal. Balconville was one of the first Canadian plays to use bilingual dialogue as an element of its production. That it is untranslated for the audience plays an important role in the efficacy of the work: “the viewer is trapped by the text into participating in a dramatic distillation of the frustrations of the nation,” noted Gilbert in Contemporary Dramatists. Its first run at the Centaur Theatre set box-office records in 1979, was a favorite that year of local drama critics, and even won a Torontoarea award for best new Canadian play.
That same year. Fennario adapted his first book, Without a Parachute, into a one-man play, Changes, that premiered in Toronto. He eventually left the Centaur, disillusioned with the pitfalls of commercial success, and became a founding member of a smaller theater company in Verdun called Black Rock Community Centre. The first work that premiered with it was Joe Beef: A History of Pointe Saint Charles in the mid-1980s.
Several later works by Fennario failed to achieve the critical and commercial success of his earlier works. One of them was the 1985 drama Doctor Thomas Neill Cream: Mystery at McGill, produced at McGill University in Montreal and published in book form in 1993. Another play, The Death of Rene Levesque, chronicles the life and times of one of French-speaking Quebec’s most prominent leaders in the separatist fight. The work was not favorably received in Montreal, “partly because it insulted some Francophone viewers,” remarked Gilbert.
Fennario is also the author of the fictionalized journal/novel of one David Wiper, Blue Mondays. The 1984 volume, set in the late 1960s and early ’70s, includes poems by Daniel Adams and illustrations from Sheila Salmela.
In 2002, David Fennario was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nerve disorder that left him initially confined to a wheelchair and unable to write or type by himself. Nevertheless, he ran for political office in 2003 and wrote and performed in Skeletal Staff, a work about the shortcomings of the healthcare system.
Politics
David is a committed Marxist.
Views
Quotations:
''The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I've been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer."
