Producing Harriet’s House: Episode 1

Harriet’s House, a play which Gailey Road plans to produce in June 2010 during the Toronto Pride Festival, is a contemporary drama that tells the story of two internationally adopted girls growing up in a same-sex family.

Synopsis of the play

Harriet has given her 17-year old adopted daughter Luísa permission to return to the orphanage where she spent three years of her childhood so that she can find out what happened to her birth mother. While Luísa works in the orphanage in Bogotá, back in Toronto Harriet comes out as a lesbian and introduces her new partner Marty to her two other daughters: 14-year old Ana who was also adopted from Colombia and 7-year old Clare who is Harriet’s birth daughter. Afraid that Luísa will reject her, Harriet doesn’t tell Luísa about Marty until Luísa returns home from Colombia to go to university. Heartbroken that she still hasn’t found out what happened to her birth mother, and angry that Harriet didn’t tell her about Marty, Luísa returns to Bogotá to continue her search. When Harriet falls seriously ill, however, she decides to take Marty, Ana and Clare to Bogotá to bring Luísa home. A meditation on mothering and daughtering, Harriet’s House examines how a mother and her three daughters negotiate the challenges and politics of international adoption.

Beginnings

Harriet’s House grew out of a series of 10-minute plays I wrote dramatizing moments or snapshots in the lives of two North American families who have adopted children from Colombia. The series is called Global Family and it spans a period of 7 years. The series portrays the challenges the two families face as they negotiate three family worlds: the world of their “Global Family” in North America, the world of the children’s birth country, Colombia, and the gay and lesbian worlds of two family members.

While each of the 10-minute plays explores an interesting moment in the world of transnational adoption in both straight and queer families, I decided that I wanted to explore some the themes that had emerged in the 10-minute play series more deeply than the genre of 10-minute playwriting allows. Using the language of the visual arts, I saw my 10-minute play series as set of sketches that were now able to inform a bigger painting I wanted to create. The sketches gave me a set of characters I could bring to life in a full-length play.

In August 2008, my partner Margot and I spent a week in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was the week after Family Week and there were still lots of same-sex families in town. Lots of these same-sex families were also mixed race families. White American parents were walking up and down Commercial Street with children who were adopted from Central America, Asia, or who were African-American or mixed-raced children. Most parents spoke English with their kids but once, while we were at the public library standing in line waiting for the bathroom, a mother with a daughter adopted from Central America asks us if she could go to the front of the line because it was “an emergency”. When we say yes, the mother spoke to the little girl in Spanish.

Later that night, Jennie McNulty, a lesbian comic from Los Angeles made the following joke: “There are a lot of Asians in Provincetown this week. They’re looking for their children.” The crowd was surprised. A few people laughed quietly, but most were silent, stunned that Jennie would go there. One man yelled out, “Oh, nasty.”

The politics of race and language and sexuality embodied in the mixed-race, same-sex families vacationing in Provincetown that week were alive and in our face. It was at this moment that I decided to write a full-length play about a same-sex, mixed-race family. That play became Harriet’s House.

Workshopping

About a year later, after a first draft of the play was completed, Gailey Road produced a four-day workshop that allowed me to explore the characters, themes and politics of Harriet’s House. The workshop was facilitated by Toronto Director Jocelyn Wickett, stage managed by Gillian Lewis, and archived by Amy Gullage. Collaborating Toronto artists were: Lara Arabian, Clair Alcott, Sochi Fried, Jorie Morrow and Sora Olah.

International feedback

As described in my blog entry on Thursday, November, 12, 2009, I had the opportunity to read several scenes from my play Harriet’s House at the International Women’s Playwright Conference in Mumbai, India. The feedback I received from my colleagues inspired a new set of revisions of the play.

Next steps
The next steps in producing the play involve finding a venue. The story of this step of the process will appear in Producing Harriet’s House: Episode 2.

All the best,
Tara