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ALL THE LITTLE
ANIMALS
I HAVE EATEN![]()
Playwright’s Note
How and where do we live? What did we have to do to get there? Do we have the imagination to be somewhere else?
All the Little Animals I Have Eaten is the third play in what I think of as a ‘shelter trilogy,’ which includes Crawlspace and Drama: Pilot Episode.
The three plays are concerned with precarity; with the desire to transcend one’s circumstances; with the overwhelming yearning for a place to rest, to feel at home. I have looked through dark, comedic lenses as I have written these plays – as I wonder where we are going and how we got here. Dark, but in the end these plays cleave to the light because I think of comedy as a kind of duty … and that real estate is weirdly funny.
All the Little Animals I Have Eaten is for my nieces, Jade, Becky, and Zoë. Also for Laine and Vaughan and for the little nephews, too.
Production History
As this book goes to print, All the Little Animals I Have Eaten has not yet opened, so its production history exists in present and future tense. It will officially premiere nine days after it hits the presses – on January 12, 2017.
The world premiere of All the Little Animals is being presented as part of the High Performance Rodeo, produced by One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre in Calgary.
The cast is:
Georgina Beaty as ‘A,’ the Ghost of Sylvia Plath, other characters.
Nadien Chu as ‘B,’ the Ghost of Virginia Woolf, other characters.
Denise Clarke as ‘C,’ the Ghost of Anne Sexton, other characters.
and
Ellen Close as Frankie, the Server.
Direction and Dramaturgy: Blake Brooker
Staging: Denise Clarke
Lighting Design: Sandi Somers
Sound Design: Peter Moller
Costumes: Heather Moore
Technical Director: Geoff Buchanan
Production Stage Manager:Johanne Deleeuw
For One Yellow Rabbit
Artistic Director: Blake Brooker
Managing Director and Managing Producer of the High
Performance Rodeo: Ann Connors
The extraordinary OYR Team (see www.oyr.org)
Acknowledgements
The playwright acknowledges the essential support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Enbridge Playwriting Award.
She also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Banff Playwrights Colony (2014 and 2016), a partnership between the Banff Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts. Also, the Citadel Theatre Academy – Playwright Forum, the Alberta Playwrights Network, and the Script Salon Series in Edmonton through Equity in Theatre, and the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
Many thanks to Dr. Lynne Mursin for her generous patronage and inspiration.
Blake Brooker’s theatrical imagination and intelligence have inspired this play from its start. His deft grasp of my proto-thoughts and his stewardship as Director and Dramaturge over the past few years have informed and made real this performance project and the book that is Animals. I stole a few of my favourite lines directly from his lips or pen and I am so grateful.
Playwrights Colleen Murphy and John Murrell, OC, AOE, have been cherished and demanding mentors. Their words are indirectly – and directly – embedded in the text and I am deeply indebted.
One Yellow Rabbit offers generous and, I think, essential time to rehearse its new plays. The company of designers, artists, administrators and technicians OYR assembled for ATLA have safeguarded the final development of the script.
Cheers to the Performing Posse: to Georgina Beaty, Nadien Chu, Denise Clarke, Ellen Close, and Johanne Deleeuw for lending their imaginations and their skills to the final shaping of the script. These artists’ ideas and words are on these pages and I will be eternally grateful to them for their blazing generosity.
A play such as this benefits enormously from readings aloud. My thanks to Soulpepper and to Guillermo Verdecchia for his literary intelligence and for his faith; to Trevor Rueger and the Alberta Playwrights Network for the same, and for the earliest reads; to Elizabeth Swados; to Brian Quirt, Jenna Rodgers, and the Banff Playwrights’ Colony; Colleen Murphy, Brian Dooley, and the Citadel Forum; Script Salon Series, Edmonton. To Iris Turcott and her Factory WIRED. And to all the actors for talking about whatever it is women talk about.
Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Alison Bechdel and Liz Wallace are all quoted directly – from their works, journals, interviews. The poets’ direct quotes are noted on pages 149–50.
Also quoted, perhaps more indirectly, are Kate Lynch, Derek Parfit, Jamie Dunsdon, Susan Sontag, Jennifer Egan, Laurie Penny, Jennifer Kesler, Joe Wenderoth, Marina O’Loughlin, John Cassidy, and the Dark Mountain Project.
All the Little Animals I Have Eaten
The play is performed by four actors, female: different ages, and different from each other.
The characters they play are largely professionals: women who might frequent a high-end bistro, which, in this play, could mean being anything from an insurance adjuster to a dead writer to a ballerina from a music box.
There is nothing in the way of set except a super-contemporary French bistro table and chairs. The tab...
