 Magpie,
Having, Hunger Striking
AUTHOR: Kit Brennan ISBN: 0921833644
In Magpie, winner of the Grain Drama Award, we meet Bernice, large, middle-aged, and prone to fantasies. Her small-town life is disrupted by the arrival of a gifted dance instructor. He is everything she aspires to be and that her background rejects as frivolous. The men in her life, husband, doctor and evangelist preacher, cannot keep her in the confines of her reality, and her fantasy world escalates into a place that is much larger and more exciting than life. Having dramatizes our progressive society and its materialistically-driven values and cyber-navigated spaces within a romantic arch of 18th-century poetry and the motif of the "highwayman." Contemporary lives raging with ambition, self-destructive tendencies and the fight for freedom and control are played out in a high-tech world set in the mystical ambience conjured by the "moors." In Hunger Striking Sarah's student, Katie, has just died of anorexia. Her death propels Sarah into her own memories, taking her from her present day reality as a high school English teacher into multiple pasts: her own past as an anorexic girl twenty years earlier, her Celtic heritage with its vivid creatures and mythology passed on to her by her father, and the world of the hunger-striking suffragettes at the beginning of the last century.
REVIEWS: "Playwright Kit Brennan, who lived for a time in Lloydminster before moving back East, shows a penetrating knowledge of, and a keen, contagious sympathy for the wrung-out and repressed prairie wife and mother in this unique one-act play [Magpie]." —The Saskatoon StarPhoenix
"Kit Brennan successfully charts the mental landscape of an anorexic. This play [Hunger Striking] is billed as semi-autobiographical, but what lifts it above the usual confessional monologue is the mythology woven poetically throughout. Brennan very successfully shows how Sarah has retreated from adolescence and family tension by creating a whole new world for herself, a place in which her actions have their own logic." —The Globe and Mail
"The real life of this play [Hunger Striking] lies in the script's detailed portraiture. Young Sarah is a fully drawn, complex person who resists leaving childhood to reach puberty and become gendered is to lose freedom. Playwright Kit Brennan captures the fierce fanaticism of that volatile time of life in Sarah's desire to be heroic and distilled to pure bonelike Joan of Arc, all will and holy voices." —Eye Weekly Other
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