Allan - My Sisters Keeper

Canadian
Play
Series

Ted Allan

This edition was first published in 1976 by University of Toronto Press.

Copyright 1969 by Ted Allan

This play is fully protected by copyright. All enquiries concerning professional or amateur rights, readings, or any other use of this material should be directed to the author through University of Toronto Press, or outside Canada to the author c/o Howard Hausman, William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.

Canadian Play Series
General Editor: Jack Gray

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Allan, Ted.

My sisters keeper.

(Canadian play series)
Bibliography: p.
I. Title.
PR9199.3.A384M9 812.54 76-45644
ISBN 0-8020-2208-1

Photograph by Paul Lindell

Printed in Canada

My Sisters Keeper was first presented under the title of Ive Seen You Cut Lemons at the Fortune Theatre, London, England, on 5 December 1969.

Sarah Diane Cilento
Robert Robert Hardy

Directed by Sean Connery
Designed by Sean Kenny

The revised version under the title of My Sisters Keeper was first presented at the Lennoxville Festival during the 1974 summer season.

Sarah Patricia Hamilton
Robert Roland Hewgill

Directed by William Davis
Designed by Maxine Graham
Costumes designed by Janet Logan
Lighting environment by Vladimir Svetlovsky

The play is set in the London, England, flat of Robert, a university lecturer from Canada. His sister Sarah comes from Canada to visit. We learn she has a history of mental illness. We learn they have been deeply emotionally involved and that he feels guilty for her illness. We also learn to ask a question: which one of them is the mentally ill one?

It is the absence of love which leads to madness.

Doctors have made up their categories of insanity. So have I. I have five:

1. Paranoids
2. Charlatans
3. Schizophrenics
4. Manic-depressives
5. Normal people

Some paranoids and charlatans are also manic-depressive. To add to the confusion most doctors today lump all mental illness under the label of schizophrenia.

Stalin was a classic sadist paranoid, Hitler a classic charlatan. They serve as models for similar leader types who too often become heads of governments, business corporations, trade unions, political parties, terrorist groups, armies, gangster organizations, as well as the smaller fry who become husbands and fathers and victimize only their immediate families. They are rarely hospitalized because their delusions are shared by society which considers them either normal or genius as long as they are masterful and successful.

Meanwhile the most sensitive amongst us, unable to bear our stupidities and cruelties, continue to fill our mental hospitals, and are described as dissociated schizophrenics and manic-depressives.

Sarah is such a victim, a barometer of what we do to one another, particularly what our society does to women. Robert, on the other hand, is normal like you and me.

CAST

ROBERT WALLER , a university lecturer

SARAH LAWSON , his guest

The play is set in Robert Wallers bachelor flat in London, and takes place over a period of a month.

The London bachelor flat of Robert Waller, a Canadian university lecturer. The place is tastefully, if Spartanly, furnished. A large studio window overlooks the Thames from where we occasionally hear tugs and gulls. The sun floods the room with dazzling light.

We can see part of the kitchen; a hallway, which leads off the main room, leads to two unseen bedrooms. The place is sane and pleasant, with bookshelves, recordings, a hi-fi set, TV set, and radio. Picasso reproductions and Chinese paintings are on the wall, here and there a small Chinese sculpture.

At rise, Robert is busy packing, answering the telephone, and reading from his thick manuscript totally abstracted and dissociated.

The phone rings. Hes busy reading and doesnt hear it at first. Finally he hears it.