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    We the Family: A Play
    We the Family: A Play
    We the Family: A Play
    Ebook169 pages1 hour

    We the Family: A Play

    By George F. Walker and Chris Johnson

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    About this ebook

    Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism.

    We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed. The list of characters in We the Family reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the main characters, David and Lizzie Kaplan, a Jewish–Irish-Catholic mixed marriage, marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese-Canadian widow. The supporting cast includes a Russian, a Palestinian, and an Italian, with Pakistanis, Sicilians, and still more Russians offstage in the wings.

    By the end of the play, Walker has deconstructed the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the play’s pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrific ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving with vicious preoccupation. These hyphenated Canadians certainly aren’t “nice,” and no quantity of “sweet-and-sour matzah balls” (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

    Cast of 3 men and 7 women.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateApr 5, 2016
    ISBN9780889229839
    We the Family: A Play
    Author

    George F. Walker

    George F. Walker has been one of Canada’s most prolific and popular playwrights since his career in theatre began in the early 1970s. His first play, The Prince of Naples, premiered in 1972 at the newly opened Factory Theatre, a company that continues to produce his work. Since that time, he has written more than twenty plays and has created screenplays for several award-winning Canadian television series. Part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll, Walker’s distinctive, gritty, fast-paced comedies satirize the selfishness, greed, and aggression of contemporary urban culture. Among his best-known plays are Gossip (1977); Zastrozzi, the Master of Discipline (1977); Criminals in Love (1984); Better Living (1986); Nothing Sacred (1988); Love and Anger (1989); Escape from Happiness (1991); Suburban Motel (1997, a series of six plays set in the same motel room); and Heaven (2000). Since the early 1980s, he has directed most of the premieres of his own plays. Many of Walker’s plays have been presented across Canada and in more than five hundred productions internationally; they have been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish, and Czechoslovakian. During a ten-year absence from theatre, he mainly wrote for television, including the television series Due South, The Newsroom, This Is Wonderland, and The Line, as well as for the film Niagara Motel (based on three plays from his Suburban Motel series). Walker returned to the theatre with And So It Goes (2010). Awards and honours include Member of the Order of Canada (2005); National Theatre School Gascon-Thomas Award (2002); two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred); five Dora Mavor Moore Awards; and eight Chalmers Canadian Play Awards.

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      Book preview

      We the Family - George F. Walker

      Title Page

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Production History

      Characters and Setting

      We the Family

      Scene 1 • Scene 2 • Scene 3 • Scene 4 • Scene 5 • Scene 6 • Scene 7 • Scene 8 • Scene 9 • Scene 10 • Scene 11 • Scene 12 • Scene 13 • Scene 14 • Scene 15 • Scene 16 • Scene 17 • Scene 18 • Scene 19 • Scene 20 • Scene 21 • Scene 22 • Scene 23 • Scene 24 • Scene 25 • Scene 26 • Scene 27 • Scene 28

      About the Author

      Copyright

      We the Family

      INTRODUCTION

      Who are the we in We the Family? Who is us and who is other? Are we Canadians really the nice, big, multi­­cultural family we like to see ourselves as, or do the tsunamis of social-media bigotry let loose in response to the Idle No More movement – or to the niqab issue or to the plight of Syrian refugees – reveal some nasty family secrets?

      From very early in his playwriting career, back in the early 1970s, George F. Walker has written about class, demolishing the Canadian myth which denies the existence of class in Canada. I often write about people who no one else writes about, he said recently in an interview published in The Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, where We the Family was given its premiere production at Hart House Theatre. The poor, the desperate and the messed up … there’s very little voice for the poor in Canadian theatre, so I tend to gravitate towards that. However, only relatively recently has Walker begun to subvert that most sacred of Canadian sacred cows, multiculturalism.

      I think his iconoclastic attack on the nice, Canadian version of multiculturalism begins with This Is Wonderland, the TV series Walker co-wrote with Dani Romain and which inaugurated the first of its three seasons in 1999. Set in Toronto’s Old City Hall, now a courthouse, the series follows the adventures of Alice de Raey, a neophyte lawyer, as she navigates the beleaguered Canadian legal system, populated by the poor, the desperate, and the messed up to whom Walker refers in the Varsity interview. All too often Alice’s clients are further marginalized because they belong to a racial or ethnic minority. This is not white, Anglo Toronto the Good, but the twenty-­first century, multicultural Toronto – whose linguistic diversity requires the employment of translators speaking 170 languages in the real-life Toronto courthouse – that provides the series’ setting; the series’ soundscape is enriched and complicated by fifteen of those languages as characters frequently vent their frustration and express their anguish in tongues other than English. In This Is Wonderland, the comfortable Canadian self-defining myth of multiculturalism is challenged by the frequency with which characters are unable to understand each other, sometimes with comic results, but often, with tragic consequences. The we in the Canadian family Walker depicts in This Is Wonderland (as well as in a subsequent TV series, The Weight; in his 2000 stage play, Heaven; and in a number of the recent plays, is infinitely more complex and nuanced than the widespread, popular version of multiculturalism would have it.

      Often in Walker’s work, family is story. Family, class, and now race and ethnicity, function as destiny, unless the characters determine otherwise, despite horrendous odds against them. Most of Walker’s East End plays are family plays, and all the recent outpouring of Walker plays, starting in 2010, are family plays as well. One of Walker’s most important ongoing projects is an exploration and questioning of family values. In We the Family, Walker upends the traditional notion of family while also subverting multiculturalism, thus simultaneously interrogating our notion of family on both the domestic and national levels. We the Family’s list of characters reads like an ethnic joke, which, indeed, it is, at least in part: the son of the Kaplans, a Jewish­-Irish Catholic mixed marriage (like the one depicted in Heaven), marries the daughter of Jenny Lee, a Chinese­-Canadian widow. The supporting cast includes a Russian, a Palestinian, and an Italian, with Pakistanis, Sicilians, and still more Russians offstage in the wings.

      Walker plays a dangerous game in this play, implicating the audience by luring us into stereotyping and self­-revelation when characters behave in ways that push their ethnic stereo­type, and by alternately shocking us and compelling us to laugh with numerous racial and ethnic jokes, slurs, and insults. The best dark comedy makes us question ourselves as to whether we are good people. While telling this absurdly and hilariously convoluted story, Walker airs our national family’s dirty laundry, exposing the polite and not-so-polite racism that runs through Canadian society, which he depicts not as a big, happy, multicultural family but as an aggregation of mutually distrustful clans. Sabine Schluter says that Walker deconstructs the Canadian Mosaic in Heaven, and he continues the job in We the Family. While he’s at it, he deconstructs the dysfunctional Kaplan and Lee families and family love as well. Through the play’s pervading treachery, with family members and lovers betraying each other in horrific ways, he satirizes the hypocrisy of expounding family values while behaving with selfish preoccupation. These hyphenated Canadians certainly aren’t nice, and no quantity of sweet-and-sour matzah balls (which the Kaplan matriarch serves at the multicultural wedding reception) can hide the nasty taste.

      This is certainly a Walker play, gloriously funny and disturbingly dark. Still, as in many

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