No White Picket Fence. Robin C. Whittaker

allows the company to map out myriad playing areas to generate unique relationships between plays and audiences. In the case of No White Picket Fence, TST created an enduring text in collaboration with Dr. Suzanne (Sue) McKenzie-Mohr from voices of those who are often silenced, with the aim of spreading their perspectives to generate social change.

      Born of a research project conducted by Sue, a faculty member in the St. Thomas University School of Social Work, No White Picket Fence is “verbatim theatre,” a non-traditional and powerful means by which people’s accounts of their experiences – stories that are seldom heard – can be shared.

Many studies have focused on adverse outcomes for young adults after exiting care. Having often spent years in challenging home situations, followed by limited stability in the care system and inadequate supports through their transition into adulthood, many youth have faced significant challenges after their time in care, including higher-than-average rates of poverty, unemployment, housing instability, and victimization. Without question, such challenges are important for us to understand. However, a smaller number of researchers have studied factors that support youths’ resilience and growth after their time in care.

      When Sue envisioned this research project in 2014, her hope was to hear directly from young women who had left the care system in their teens and had come to live well, and to offer them the opportunity to share at length about their experiences. Importantly, there were no imposed criteria for “living well.” Rather, understanding oneself to be living well at the time of the interviews was requisite to participation in the study.

      In total, ten young women (average age twenty-five years) agreed to participate in the research. The broad question asked early in each individual interview was: “Could you tell me about your experience from your time in care to your current time of living well? You can begin wherever you like, and include or leave out whatever you choose. I’m just really interested in learning about your experience.”

      The young women’s accounts were unique and rich in detail. The timing of first being taken into care varied significantly across participants – from birth to age fifteen (although most entered the care system for the first time between the ages of nine and thirteen). While two of the women had remained with the same extended family unit while in care (both involving kinship care), the other eight had faced much greater instability through impermanent care arrangements. Only one of the participants had returned for any significant length of time to a biological parent’s custody. Seven of the ten young women had utilized post-guardianship / extended care agreements.

Across all participants’ interviews, the women made clear that they could not adequately articulate their journeys of coming to live well following their time in care without first describing their experiences that led them to enter the care system. Thus, each interview involved accounts spanning participants’ experiences before, during, and after their time spent in care, and beyond into their current lives navigating the world as young adults. These were difficult stories for women to share about their lives, and they were difficult stories to hear. And not surprisingly, participants did not describe an easy or straightforward path to living well. Their accounts highlighted varied and significant efforts to achieve a better life in a process that had continued over years. Indeed, each woman framed “living well” not as an endpoint but as an evolving experience as they continued to grow and thrive.

      After the research team’s completion and transcription of all interviews, and their execution of preliminary analysis utilizing qualitative research methods informed by feminist theory, participants were invited to meet again with Sue to review early interpretations and to offer their feedback before the team finalized their analyses. At the conclusion of this rigorous process, Sue and the team began to present their research results at public forums.

      Despite convincing research findings, Sue was dissatisfied with the project’s outcome. The compelling, complex, and moving nature of the women’s accounts, and the learnings that could be gleaned from them, had been muted by the scientific process, thematic summary, and the flattening of the flesh-and-bone messiness of lived experience into the tidy articulation of a scholarly report. Sue’s discontent with the traditional means of disseminating research findings became a catalyst for our creative collaboration.

      COLLABORATIVE BEGINNINGS

      In late 2015, Sue asked to meet with Dr. Robin C. Whittaker, associate professor and drama advisor in St. Thomas’s Department of English and artistic producer for Theatre St. Thomas. After describing the research study she had undertaken, Sue asked Robin how this project might be developed further, how the learnings might be lifted from the written page into a more powerful articulation of participants’ complex lived experiences. Robin replied simply, “Verbatim theatre and Theatre St. Thomas.” And with that statement, an unexpected and exhilarating collaboration began.

Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary drama in which the entirety of the dialogue is drawn word-for-word from the voices of real people, in this case from excerpts drawn from the interviews that Sue conducted with the ten women whose stories we hear in No White Picket Fence. Unlike traditional realism, the form allowed Robin and Sue to keep alive multiple journeys without reducing them to one story, one heroine, or one impression. No two “foster kids” – no two “youth in care” – are the same. Ever.

      Sue and Robin agreed that TST was ideal for this sort of project. Students at St. Thomas are socially conscious to a fault, with an unflinching rehearsal ethic. And like Solo Chicken Productions / TST’s community-engaged play Rabbit-Town (2014), No White Picket Fence educates. It also seeks to advocate.

      Before any steps could be taken to advance what Robin and Sue had envisioned, an amendment to the research project required approval by the university’s Research Ethics Board. Research participants were then contacted to explain the addition to the project and invited to participate in this component by allowing the use of their interviews for the creation of the script. All ten participants gave their consent.

      CREATING AND DIRECTING THE VERBATIM SCRIPT

      Over four weeks during the summer of 2016, Robin listened to dozens of interview hours, read a thousand transcript pages, and whittled down these heartbreaking and inspiring stories to a 196-page script (or a ten-and-a-half-hour play). After adding some moments and subtracting many others, he and Sue eventually arrived at a forty-page script (or a ninety-six-minute production) that they believed honoured individual journeys while also generating, at selected moments, community among the women. Research participants were each invited to review and give input to the draft script, and through the early autumn eight of the women chose to review and share their reflections. The participants approved the script and, for this, Robin and Sue were humbled.

Scheduled as the winter production in TST’s 2016–2017 Season, No White Picket Fence had its auditions in September alongside TST’s fall show. By mid-October, with the script finalized and the creative team chosen, Robin, Sue, and TST’s technical director and resident designer, Chris Saad, prepared for rehearsals, which began in November. The actors who played the ten women in the play’s world premiere were university students or recent graduates in their twenties. They did not receive the script beforehand, and all members of the creative team were required to attend the first read-through. Importantly, the initial rehearsal centred on establishing a highly respectful tone. Discussion of the purpose of the research project and the play, and signing confidentiality agreements, were crucial before undertaking the first read-through.

      Participants’ accounts reflect times of chaos and deep suffering, and they also highlight persistent efforts to resist and move toward living well. The script focuses attention on the urgent need for substantive changes to a care system that often struggles to meet its central mandate to protect and nurture our youth. Given the play’s focus, having the opportunity to debrief experiences and issues explored in the script was important, both for building support among team members and for framing the theatre project as a form of social justice work.

      Research participants were invited to attend