Tannahill - Age of minority: 3 solo plays

Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays Copyright 2013 by Jordan Tannahill

Playwrights Canada Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Tannahill, Jordan

[Plays. Selections.]

Get yourself home Skyler James -- Peter Fechter : 59 minutes -

rihannaboi95.

Age of minority : three solo plays / Jordan Tannahill.

Electronic monograph.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77091-196-3

1. Gays--Drama. I. Title.

PS8639.A579A6 2013 C812.6 C2013-904418-3

C2013-904419-1

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

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 Skylers 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 ones 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 Walls Death Stripan image I first saw when I myself was eighteen. I spent five yearsfrom my adolescence into early adulthoodinserting 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 Peters real life, in the end my research could only bring me so far. The burning questions I had about Peterwhat was going through his head in the moments before he jumped, in the moments after he was shotcould 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 wasnt your typical tya 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. Wed 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 GayStraight 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 Id 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.