Trapsongs: Three Plays

first edition

© 2020 by Shannon Bramer

introduction © 2020 by Sara Tilley

all rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Trapsongs : three plays / Shannon Bramer.

Names: Bramer, Shannon, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200360426 |

Canadiana (ebook) 20200360493

ISBN 9781771666213 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771666220 (EPUB)

ISBN 9781771666237 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771666244 (Kindle)

Classification: LCC PS8553.R269 T73 2020 | DDC C812/.54—dc23

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug Press also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

Book*hug Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippawa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. We recognize the enduring presence of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.

This book is for Ruth, Sara, Mark

& the Women’s Work Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland

I cannot think how it all came about.

Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.

I daresay not, said Dorthea, pinching her sister’s chin.

"If you knew how it came about, it would not seem

wonderful to you."

Can’t you tell me? said Celia, settling her arms cosily.

"No, dear, you would have to feel with me,

else you would never know."

from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Introduction

these plays are poems, these poems are plays

sara tilley

I first met shannon bramer at the banff centre in 2003. I was a few years out of theatre school and trying to write a novel, pretty dang young and painfully shy. I talked to Shannon and her husband, Dave, at one of the retreat get-

togethers, and wondered how it would feel to be married to another writer. I confessed that I nearly didn’t show up to the party that night, so great was my social anxiety. Shannon said she felt the same way, but luckily she had Dave there to help her be brave. We discovered we’d both studied theatre at York University, but she’d graduated the year I arrived, and our paths hadn’t crossed. I remember loving her poems, which she performed quietly at the retreat’s reading night. Some of them sounded like monologues. I thought they were funny and sad at once, deceptive in their simplicity—humble poems, stuffed to the brim with heart and humanity. I could say the same of her plays, now.

In 2009, Shannon submitted her first play, Monarita, to the Women’s Work Festival, a dramaturgical festival for works-in-progress that my theatre company, She Said Yes!, was co-producing with White Rooster Theatre and RCA Theatre Company, in St. John’s. (It has since grown into a fantastic stand-alone festival, still going strong—in fact, Shannon has had four of her scripts workshopped there over the years, including all three of the plays in this volume.)

That year, Ruth Lawrence (White Rooster Theatre), Nicole Rousseau (RCA Theatre Company), and I split the submissions into thirds for our first round of reading. Nicole came back to the next meeting, on fire about one particular script, and insisted we read it right away. We fell in love with it. Ruth and I played Mona and Rita during that first workshop with dramaturge Robert Chafe. (Note: We cast ourselves. Running a pennies-for-miracles theatre company has to come with an advantage once in a while, right?) The workshop only cemented what we already knew—we had to find a way to produce the premiere of this piece. We had to play these characters.

Monarita premiered in 2010 in St. John’s, a co-production between She Said Yes!, White Rooster Theatre, and RCA Theatre Company. It was remounted by She Said Yes! and White Rooster in 2011, and toured to multiple cities across Canada, a first for both companies. We shared the play with audiences in Halifax, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Hamilton, touring through a record-breaking heat wave. In Hamilton, we performed in a theatre with a broken air conditioner. I poured two bottles of water on my head while I did Mona’s monologue about preschools. Several audience members fainted. My costume spontaneously ripped down the side seams as the fabric simply gave up. Shannon came to our premiere in St. John’s, saw shows in Hamilton, and even travelled to Halifax with her mom to see us there. In Toronto, she made sandwich boards with her kids, handed out flyers, helped gather props, drove us around, and made us meals—in essence, she adopted us. I feel blessed to count her as a long-distance friend and colleague, to this day.

Monarita remains special to me for many reasons. Mona is one of the most mercurial, nuanced characters I’ve ever had the luck to play. We were able to perform this show many more times than usual—in the world of independent theatre, plays often run for four or five nights and then close forever. We were able to inhabit these characters dozens of times, and each time the play opened up a little more for me. I think I could have lived in that world forever and not gotten tired of it. Shannon made a poem for the stage and didn’t solve all the riddles for us, empowering us to find a heightened-yet-realistic performance style to match the text. I truly found my way into the character once we started working with hair and makeup as the equivalent to a clown nose—a mask that lets you transform and lift off from the everyday self. Mona’s hair was bad; I knew this from the script. I went home and found some barrettes I’d worn as a girl. (Yes, I’m a packrat.) Cheap plastic colours to hold back my bangs, and a needlessly severe ponytail. Then some makeup, clumsily applied. (Mona tries.) Ruth’s equivalent was Rita’s fantastically fake blond wig, and immaculate, bright lipstick. (Rita doesn’t try. Or if she does, no one will ever be privy to it.)

I love how Monarita straddles the boundary between real and surreal. I love how lovely the language is—this playwright is a poet, and it shows. I love that it makes me laugh. I love that the play is also a spell. It contains magic, and I’m not just talking about the spontaneous garbage fire. The whole play is a spell woven around our hearts, and it doesn’t let go once the house lights come back up. In revisiting the script now, I’m moved by how tender it is, and how hopeful. These two halves-of-self do, in the end, reconcile. They make themself(ves) whole.

The three seemingly disparate plays in Trapsongs are part of an ongoing literary inquiry. For the past twenty years, Shannon Bramer’s poetry and plays have been concerned with how we craft our own realities, and how our interior lives are as individuated as fingerprints. Her work examines how we are each alone and how we yearn for connection. How people inevitably interpenetrate each other, and how this can heal us or it can hurt. How sensuality and innocence can coexist. How art has the power to transform us, how it is generative and regenerative. As Hannah says, in The Collectors, I’m working on something here. I know that if I concentrate I will create something. Something with a heartbeat of its own and a running leg or two. I want it to move. I want it to stir.

Shannon Bramer puts vulnerable interior realities onto the stage/page for us to share in. The plays in this volume are about how we make our own traps and then sing our way out of them. The traps are necessary for the creation of the songs. The songs have no meaning without the traps. Shannon’s theatre is spare and