Theatre at UBC Presents Good Mother

Damien Atkins is 26 years old. Since graduating from Grant MacEwan's Musical theatre Program in 1994, Damien has worked with companies such as The Canadian Stage Co., Theatre Calgary, and both the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. Selected credits include the Canadian Premiere of the acclaimed British play "Shopping and Fucking" with Crow's Theatre, Osric in "Hamlet", Mendel in "Fiddler on the Roof", Dapper in "The Alchemist", and "Macbeth", "The Tempest", "Titus Andronicus" and "Elizabeth Rex" for the Stratford Festival, "Our Country's Good" for Theatrefront, "The Chocolate Soldier" and "Titanic" for the Shaw Festival, Jack in the Canadian Premiere of "Into the Woods" for Canadian Stage Co./Theatre Calgary, and the title role in Brad Fraser's "Young Art" for Theatre Network. Additional credits include the film "Angel Square" with Anne Wheeler, and "The Veldt" for Ray Bradbury Theatre and the upcoming "Children of My Heart", "Attention to Detail", "The Art of Woo", "I Was a Rat" (BBC) and "The Matthew Shepard Story" for NBC. In 1996, at the age of 20, Damien received an Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Outstanding Performance, for a play he wrote and performs, "Miss Chatelaine", which played at the Grand Theatre in London in the winter of 1998, and opened in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille in January 1999 to sold out houses and critical acclaim. He has also won the Elliot Hayes Award from the Stratford Festival for Outstanding New Playwright. His second play, "Good Mother" won the $25,000 University of British Columbia's Creative Writing Program's Prism International Prize for 2000 and received its world premiere at the Stratford Festival in 2001. He is the youngest playwright ever to be produced at the Stratford Festival. Damien's new cabaret show, "Real Live Girl" will premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto in December 2001. Damien is also currently at work on a new play for Buddies in Bad Times, a play commissioned by the Stratford Festival, and a collection of short stories.

I started writing the play in 1997 (I have actually written in on three different computers: my old Apple 2C, a battered old Apple laptop, and my new iBook laptop) when I was working at the Shaw Festival. When I was not asked back, which was difficult, I needed something to keep myself working and feeling productive until I could get another acting gig. So I continued working on Good Mother - challenging myself to see if I could write a multi character play for other actors, with a simple story but complex emotions. I showed the script (at first it was 150 pages) to various friends, well known writer Michael MacLennan among them, and they all gave me interesting notes. My best friend Shelley is actually my best editor. When i went to Stratford I organized a reading of the play and people kept talking aboutit so much that I had to organize another, official reading for the artistic director when I returned in my second year. I heard nothing for a few months, and then he came to me with the news that he had just received board of governors approval to do the play. Shortly after that I won the PRISM award. It all happened at once. We had been workshopping this play all year, leading up to the premiere at Stratford, and the Festival was one hundred percent committed to it.

Your personality lives in your brain. Learned behaviours, attitudes, eccentricities. It's just biology. Anne has had a mind altering event. " Speaking is 'Good Mother''s resident neuropsychologist, Kathryn Omer. The "Anne" in question here is Anne Driver, the mother of the Driver Family, and unquestionably the gravitational centre of the family solar system. Dr. Omer's opinion has been carved out of decades of studying the brain and brain injury survivors. But is she right? What makes up someone's personality? Is it hard wired into your brain? Or is it something ineffable, something not so easily placed, is your personality your soul? Or a third and stranger option: does our personality live only in the way we are perceived by other people? If that's true, then we define each other, and are defined by people's perceptions. We "own" little pieces of each other. No wonder we find it so hard to let people go. Someone dies, a relationship breaks up, someone moves away - often we are called upon to let someone go. Most of the time we find it difficult, if not impossible. The situation in "Good Mother" is even more complicated. A woman suffers a stroke and a brain injury and her personality has been strangely and posssibly irrevocably altered. Her family struggles to find a balance between hoping that she will get better, and moving on. But Anne's body is still alive, even if her old personality is not, and it is a constant reminder to them of the woman she used to be. Researching brain injuries yielded twenty plays' worth of interesting details and provocative questions. Groups of brain injury survivors often have conflicting and contradictory presentations of their brain injuries. No two are alike. Even published materials can be wildly contradictory. I investigated the medicine to find the most telling symptoms - symptoms that we could bring to the stage. The fact that Anne can remember some things, but not everything, the fact that she can remember who she used to be and still finds it hard to be that person again, must seem like a cruel nightmare to the Driver family. But these are typical symptoms of people who have suffered some form of brain trauma.I get a great deal of inspiration from listening to music. I can remember listening to Jann Arden's "Good Mother" and thinking that it contained a unique sentiment for pop music: gratitude. "I've got money in my pocket/I like the colour of my hair/I've got a friend who loves me/I've got a house, I've got a car/I've got a good mother..." Gratitude. Sometimes it's difficult for us to remember that our parents had a life before we came along. We forget that they even existed before we came along. The song inspired me to create a situation where a family is forced to confront someone they had taken for granted - their mother. I am very close to my parents, and the thought of losing them is terrifying to me. And if they got sick, what would be my responsibility to them? They took care of me for so many years without my thanks - will it be my turn to take care of them someday?

Another obvious inspiration for the play was Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now". It is a fact of growing up that at some point we are forced to reexamine old issues from the opposite point of view, but what happens when you have to bridge those opposing views well before you thought you were ready? I have always been curious about the way people recover from tragedies. Where do we find the strength inside of us to cope, to move on? There are no hard answers anywhere. There is no rule book for life. There are theories, therapies, strategies, but ultimately each person has to come to some private reconciliation with a tragic event. Each person has to decide whether or not he can find the energy inside him to move on. Not everybody succeeds. This is what I wanted to explore with "Good Mother". Survival. Each member of the Driver family has to find a way to survive, and they all go about it differently with initially varied measures of success.There are some things, some events - like the loss of a loved one - that we try not to think about, we try not to imagine them happening, because we cannot imagine how our lives would go on if they did. But in "Good Mother" - as sometimes in real life, the unthinkable happens - the mother of the family, the woman who seems to have the key to all of their daily lives, has a terrible, shattering accident. And suddenly the family has to reorganize around that event. The interesting thing for me was to put a family in this "no man's land" - a place where they never dared to imagine they'd be - and see whether they had the strength to survive. I hoped they would. The wounds of some tragedies never go away, but writing this play, and watching these people find hidden reserves of strength and compassion, I was forced not only to acknowledge our own basic human resilience, but the strength and resilience of hope itself.

I have been greatly inspired by all the other young writers out there who are writing and producing their own work. I hope that all writers have benefitted from the kind of skilled mentoring that I have received from sources almost too numerous to mention. I do want to thank Stephen Heatley, who saw me through my first play, and through the genesis of this play. Thank you to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, The Canadian Stage Company and Theatre Passe Muraille, all of whom have encouraged me to write and paired me with the kind of mentors that I have needed and continue to need.

I want to acknowledge the work and care of so many people who have helped me get this play ready for production. There are too many people to cite here - and I have tried to list them all in the published version of this play. But I do want to thank the original cast for their enthusiasm and commitment and love. Thanks also to Richard Monette and the Stratford Festival for their support. Thank you to Miles and Seana for both guiding and inspiring the play. And, as always, thank you to Shelley for her care and her keen eye.

- Damien Atkins

A message from Ronald Fedoruk, Head, Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing

It is a great honour for Theatre at UBC to be able to present the winning entry in the Writing Residency Prize in Stageplay. And UBC is proud indeed to be able to do something very meaningful for playwrighting across Canada and around the world. We believe that it demonstrates how two distinct programs like Creative Writing and Theatre can work together and create a framework that increases the profile of play writing as an art form in Canada, much like the Booker Prize has done for Fiction in Great Britain. A cash award of $25,000 puts this on a par with the most prestigious international prizes, and ensures that we will attract excellent submissions from very able exciting writers. In addition, the text is published in Prism International, and the Theatre Program is committed to producing the work, as you are about to enjoy. This is only the beginning of what will prove to be a significant benefit to the art of Theatre.

Damien Atkins is the first winner of the Creative Writing Residency Prize in Stage Play with his play, Good Mother. Let me take this opportunity to congratulate him on his achievement, and to express our joy at having him spend a few weeks with us as Writer in Residence in the Creative Writing Program. Thank you, Damien.

It is also a personal thrill for me to have been part of the selection panel for the prize. I love reading new scripts. I am a little in awe of writers, and it is a matter of great wonder and excitement to be one of the first persons to look at a text, to gauge its potential, to try to predict how it can be presented and to anticipate how it will be received by an audience. Imagine my excitement when I was asked to adjudicate this prize. And further imagine the palpitations when I found out that there were 140 submissions. Yikes! Be careful what you wish for.

It has been a terrific experience being associated with this prize and I am confident that you will enjoy Good Mother every bit as much as I did.