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    Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
    Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
    Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays

    By Jordan Tannahill

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award

    Based on a true story, Get Yourself Home Skyler James follows the harrowing journey of a young lesbian who defects from the army when she is outed by fellow soldiers. The award-winning rihannaboi95 centres around a Toronto teen whose world comes crashing in when YouTube videos of him dancing to songs by his favourite pop heroine go viral. Finally, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes chronicles the last hour of Peter Fechter’s life, a teenager in East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962 with his companion. Together these solo plays explore the lives of three queer youth and their resilience in the face of violence and intolerance.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateDec 4, 2013
    ISBN9781770911963
    Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays
    Author

    Jordan Tannahill

    JORDAN TANNAHILL is an internationally acclaimed playwright who was born in Ottawa and is currently based in London. Two of his plays have won a Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. He has written one previous novel, Liminal, which was published to much acclaim and named one of the best Canadian novels of 2018 by CBC Books. CBC Arts named him as “one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country’s history.” He is a regular columnist on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter. 

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      Book preview

      Age of Minority - Jordan Tannahill

      Cover: Age of Minority: three solo plays by Jordan Tannahill. Canada Council for the Arts, Governor General’s Literary Awards Winner GG.

      Age of

      Minority

      3 solo plays by

      Jordan Tannahill

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Also by Jordan Tannahill

      Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom

      Concord Floral

      Declarations

      Late Company

      Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama

      Contents

      Also by Jordan Tannahill

      Preface

      Get Yourself Home Skyler James

      On Being Skyler by Natasha Greenblatt

      Production History

      Get Yourself Home Skyler James

      rihannaboi95

      On Being Sunny by Owais Lightwala

      Production History

      rihannaboi95

      Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes

      On Being Peter by Jordan Tannahill

      Production History

      Cast

      Note on Staging

      Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes

      Playwright’s Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Copyright

      I wish to dedicate this book to my parents, Karen and Bruce, who taught me the importance of speaking up for those who have been silenced.

      Preface

      This collection presents three young people backed up against walls, metaphorically and literally, who risk everything for a chance to love and to be loved. And all three, to some extent, are queer. Beyond a merely sexual understanding of the word, they refuse the norms they are confronted with. They are sublime outcasts. Written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four, the three plays also give voice to my own coming of age.

      Get Yourself Home Skyler James was written after I befriended the real-life Skyler James in the summer of 2008 and, over a series of conversations that year, she related her story to me. By the time I sat down to write the play, I knew her voice and journey so intimately that I was able to write her monologue from beginning to end in a single sitting. While I have attempted to be as true to Skyler’s story as possible, I have taken certain fictional liberties for the sake of dramatic action and clarity.

      rihannaboi95 arose out of time I spent facilitating drama workshops at youth shelters in Toronto with the theatre company Project: Humanity. I left wanting to tell the story of a queer youth who is forced from his/her home. The form of the piece revealed itself a year later when my friend Jon Davies introduced me to the proliferation of YouTube videos being made by preteen and teenage boys dancing and lip-synching to pop songs by female divas. These videos were such uncensored and unself-conscious expressions of their inner selves. I was compelled to know who these youth were, what prompted them to record these videos, to put them online, and what the fallout might be from doing so. It also unlocked a lot of exciting theatrical opportunities for us.

      Traditionally the monologue in Western theatre has had four primary directives: an address to God, an address to the audience, an address to another character, and an address to the self. With the advent of YouTube there is a fifth. On a daily basis people confess their inner-most thoughts to an anonymous online viewership in a manner that functions somewhat as a combination of the pre-existing four directives. YouTube listens much like God does: silent, absent, and omnipotent. But then YouTube videos are made to be viewed by people, and thus an address to YouTube is an address to an audience. Or perhaps we make a video that addresses a specific individual, like a fan video to a celebrity. But more often than not we are alone when we address YouTube, and alone when we watch YouTube. We often find a way to be more vulnerable and candid with YouTube than in any other capacity of our lives, which is why YouTube, perhaps above all else, is the ultimate conversation with one’s self.

      Finally, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes is a play inspired by a photograph: the image of an eighteen-year-old boy being pulled from the Berlin Wall’s Death Strip—an image I first saw when I myself was eighteen. I spent five years—from my adolescence into early adulthood—inserting myself into that photograph, trying to understand how someone could be driven to take such a risk. While I have tried to capture many aspects of Peter’s real life, in the end my research could only bring me so far. The burning questions I had about Peter—what was going through his head in the moments before he jumped, in the moments after he was shot—could not be found in the official records but rather in my own heart and imagination. As such, I see this play as half a portrait of the real Peter and half a portrait of my own coming of age. Ultimately I hope it is both a document of a specific event and a universal meditation on what we sacrifice for love and all that we risk to gain and lose as we enter the world of adults.

      Having spent much of my own youth with these three individuals, I feel very blessed to now have the opportunity to share them with you.

      —Jordan Tannahill

      Get Yourself Home Skyler James

      On Being Skyler

      by Natasha Greenblatt

      Get Yourself Home Skyler James wasn’t your typical

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      touring experience where you might set up and perform in a different school auditorium every day. My stage manager and I stayed in each school for a week, touring individual classrooms, carrying one flat and three milk crates up and down stairs, and running the show two to four times every day. It was the most terrifyingly intimate acting experience I have ever had, at times only inches away from a front row of desks and teenage faces.

      One of my best experiences was in a portable at R.H. King Academy in Scarborough. We’d set up the night before in the wrong portable. The group of students we were supposed to perform for was tiny and the teacher from the mistaken portable took us aside and asked if we wanted to leave our set where it was, bring the original class there, and perform for a larger audience. It was a magical show. The room was filled to the brim with students, all excited by the break from their daily routine. They listened, laughed, and asked fascinating questions during the talkback after the show.

      Performing Skyler challenged my assumptions about Toronto. Earl Haig, a school known for its intensive arts program, and a school I thought would be one of the more progressive environments, was the place I felt the most intolerance (albeit from a teacher). Northern Secondary had elected a transgendered school president the year before and had an active Gay–Straight Alliance, but I experienced an almost complacent sense of self-satisfaction. It was there someone said homophobia was not a problem anymore, although when I asked some of the

      gsa

      members I was told the word gay was still commonly used as an insult.

      At R.H. King I’d been warned the large Tamil population might have difficulty with the homosexual content. But the students there were some of the most receptive, engaging in honest and in-depth discussions. One young woman spoke about the challenges of coming from an immigrant family where the attitude towards homosexuality at home was different than the mainstream attitude she was increasingly identifying with in her chosen community.

      I think the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy’ is good, said one young man from Central Tech, I wouldn’t want to know if my best friend was gay because then I’d feel weird hanging out with him. A young black man responded, It shouldn’t matter if you’re gay, just like it shouldn’t matter what race you are.

      Performing a Texan lesbian war resister/deserter seeking refugee status for grade eleven students at nine in the morning may be one of the most challenging acting experiences I will ever have. I had to learn how to keep their attention despite fire drills, announcements over the

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      , and some overzealous sign-language interpreters. But it will also live in my memory as one of the most fulfilling.

      I bumped into one student on the subway a few days after I’d performed for her class. We spoke about the effect the show had on her and her fellow students. Oh, and one other thing, she said as the subway doors opened, "we all

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