(A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses...)
A college student’s life is given meaning when he chooses to sponsor Elias, a Salvadoran refugee, as a class project. When Elias arrives, his hosts Sander and his family learn what it means and feels to be a refugee and how to relate to someone who has endured such intense personal grief. The warmth and humor of the characters invite us to embrace the situation - be at once moved and threatened by it - and to consider how we ourselves would react.
(According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a st...)
According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver. In the play, the cougar appears to embody the precarious and increasingly circumscribed state of nature. Each character relates to nature in a different way, whether it be with distrust, cynicism, awe or longing. The figure of the "Mountain Man," who has abandoned all of his civilized ways, even speech, to live among the animals of the forest, provides a meeting ground between humanity and nature. Like the cougar, increasingly crowded by a rapidly encroaching civilization, he scavenges what precious little remains of the beautiful animal in all of us.
(Jhana is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her...)
Jhana is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their border Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana's father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four of the characters into action. King is an Elvis impersonator, getting sick and tired of doing the same old song and dance. Jhana is mentally handicapped and working at her first "job" in a workshop for disabled people where she puts four screws in a bag and then another four screws in another bag and so on. In her mind, she is on stage at Maple Leaf Gardens singing and strutting her stuff, just like her father does. Maddie is trying to keep it together while working full time as a teacher and as a mother, too busy to admit to her own loneliness. Bill is harboring all sorts of feelings for Maddie that he is afraid to act on. While this is a play about the power of family and love, it is finally a play about self-destruction and creation.
(Between 1860 and 1930 an officially sanctioned child migr...)
Between 1860 and 1930 an officially sanctioned child migration from Britain to Canada took place. During that time over 80,000 children, unaccompanied by their parents or siblings and often separated from them forever, were placed at Canadian factories and farms where, more often than not, they were exploited as indentured child laborers. Alistair is a retired farmer who lives with his sister-in-law Flora and son Ewan on their family homestead. No longer a profitable or even a viable enterprise, the fields have long been leased out and the house is in serious disrepair. The scattered remnants of the family are vainly trying to hold it together and not doing a very good job of it. This is a play about family secrets and about the many forms of love, longing, and aspiration they conceal.
(We see the recent rise of home invasions in our society a...)
We see the recent rise of home invasions in our society as a violation of our most intimate places: the perpetration of heinous crimes upon the aged, the disabled, the helpless, victimizing our citizens precisely where rules of hospitality and generosity should govern our social relations. All this and more is the subject of this perceptively poignant play, Another Home Invasion, where "another" carries both its meanings: something commonplace; and something of an entirely different kind and nature. Of course, this play involves the hapless, substance-abusing, middle-aged petty criminal we expect to find there, but is he the real threat to the home’s occupants? Who are the real perpetrators of the heartless betrayal of the elderly couple who lives here: who is it that’s robbing them of their possessions, their security, their relationship, their family - their home? The answers to these questions are as surprising as they are unsettling.
(Inspired by the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski ...)
Inspired by the 2007 Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, The Valley dramatizes the volatile relationship between law enforcement and people in the grip of mental illness. The play connects both sides of this relationship by portraying two families embattled with depression, each guided by good intentions but challenged by their own flawed humanity.
(As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving w...)
As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving with her mother, brother, and sisters from her community in the southwest United States to a community in southeastern British Columbia, Canada. Her mother has been assigned to a new husband; she becomes his eighteenth wife. Gracie might be eight when the play begins but she is fifteen when the play ends – again with a journey as Gracie leaves the community. In five acts, Gracie plays herself at five ages and also gives voice to thirteen other characters - including her brother Billy who is forced out of the community a couple of years after the family arrives in Canada. The play is a work of fiction but it is inspired by the history of polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States.
Joan MacLeod is a Canadian playwright, as well as an actor, poet, and novelist. She is particularly known for her plays Amigo’s Blue Guitar and The Hope Slide.
Background
Joan MacLeod was born in 1954 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is the daughter of A. A. MacLeod and Virginia MacLeod. She was raised in North Vancouver spending many summers in Glengarry County in Ontario where both her parents came from.
Education
Joan MacLeod studied creative writing at the University of Victoria where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978, studying short fiction with Bill Valgardson and David Godfrey. Then she attended the University of British Columbia where she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1981.
Joan MacLeod is mostly known as a playwright. She also writes prose and poetry, which has been published in a wide variety of literary journals. MacLeod's first produced work was the libretto for a chamber opera, The Secret Garden, presented by Comus Theatre in Toronto in 1985. She joined the Playwrights Unit at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre in 1985 and remained playwright-in-residence there for 7 years. Her first play, Jewel, is a monologue spoken by a young woman to her dead husband, who drowned during the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland. It premiered at the Tarragon in 1987 and was subsequently produced for radio in English, French, German, Danish, and Swedish.
Her next three plays, Toronto, Mississippi (1987), Amigo's Blue Guitar (1990), and The Hope Slide (1992), also premiered at the Tarragon. The scenario for Toronto, Mississippi originated in MacLeod's experience as a social worker with the mentally disabled in the late 1970s. It explores the complex dynamics between a mother and her mildly autistic daughter, and their responses to an absentee husband/father who lives out his fantasies as an Elvis impersonator and enables his daughter to imagine a world beyond her mental limitations. In 2009 the play was revived in a co-production by Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton and Vancouver Playhouse. Despite MacLeod's reservations about its political correctness, the production was critically acclaimed as an engaging portrait of a girl struggling with personal obstacles to develop her full potential.
The motivation behind Amigo's Blue Guitar was the "appalling" refugee policies in Canada, which MacLeod encountered while involved with refugee sponsorship programs in Toronto. She addresses the question of why refugees sometimes lie - out of desperation and necessity. The Hope Slide is a complex monologue that tracks the inner journey of an actress, recollecting her turbulent girlhood in terms of her preoccupation with the Doukhobors who settled in the Canadian West.
In 1992 MacLeod returned to Vancouver and began to teach creative writing at the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen College and the University of Victoria. She wrote Little Sister, a portrait of teenage anorexia, for production at Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley Street Theatre in 1994, and it was subsequently toured by Green Thumb Theatre for Young People. Her millennium play, 2000, was commissioned and first produced by the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa in 1996. It is set on the margins of Vancouver, where the city meets the mountains - a precarious space between the civilized and the savage - portraying a technologized consumer culture that cannot entirely displace the elemental forces of nature.
In 2000 MacLeod demonstrates the limitations of optimism and hope in a world characterized by the unpredictable and unknowable, but she also enacts those values that keep intact and strengthen human interaction and the commonalities that constitute the lineaments of a civilized society. As in most of her plays, domestic space is both fraught and comforting; despite its conflicts, it shapes the values that guide individual actions. In The Shape of a Girl (2001) an adolescent girl discovers a frightening correspondence between the senseless murder of a teenager by her schoolmates and her own social behavior. Her monologue is grounded in a historically specific Canadian tragedy - the 1997 killing of a Victoria schoolgirl by a gang of teenagers, most of whom were girls. The Shape of a Girl was commissioned by Green Thumb Theatre in Vancouver and premiered in Ottawa at Great Canadian Theatre Company. It has been translated into six languages and has toured the United States and Australia.
Homechild opened in January 2006 at CanStage in Toronto - Canada’s largest not-for-profit theatre. In 2009 Another Home Invasion opened at ATP in Calgary and Tarragon Theatre in Toronto - a co-production between the two theatres. Tarragon toured the production in 2010 and 2011 from Vancouver to Halifax - with four stops in between. The Valley (2014) is a play of love, loss, and family, a story of trouble, suicide, and finding oneself, a tale of a mother, husband, and son. The most recent play is Gracie (2018), the dramatic monologue that tells the story of a girl raised in a fundamentalist community that transports child brides between polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States. From 2004 Joan has been a professor at the University of Victoria.
(The book includes two plays by Joan MacLeod, The Shape of...)
2002
Views
Joan MacLeod's poetic, lyrical plays are characterized by evocative imagery and layered themes that consider the complexities of personal and political relationships. MacLeod sees all of her plays as political, exploring the often unacknowledged tensions and conflicts in an apparently peaceful Canadian society. She believes in the power of the imagination to transform reality and enable hope.
Quotations:
"I don't want to just make a speech. I want my plays to be works of art first and a good night’s entertainment. That’s important to me."
Membership
Joan MacLeod is a member of the Amnesty International, Canadian Actors' Equity Association, and PEN International.
Connections
Joan MacLeod is married to Bill Loach. The marriage produced one child, Ana Celeste.