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    Leave of Absence
    Leave of Absence
    Leave of Absence
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    Leave of Absence

    By Lucia Frangione

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    About this ebook

    The booming bedroom community outside a large Canadian city is blown apart when fifteen-year-old Blake challenges long-held views of spirituality and sexuality. A student at the local Catholic high school, Blake confides in her best friend, Tracy, that she feels sexually attracted to her. At first encouraged and then rebuffed, Blake is eventually betrayed. Then, increasingly at risk among her peers, Blake finds the watchful and strict eyes of her Catholic school are no protection.

    Vulnerable to collectivized hatred, she remains unprotected by the adults who guard her freedom – her mother, the school principal, the local priest – all respond in different ways, some liberally supporting her emerging sexuality; others quite conservatively vilifying her as a deviant, outside the church and outside the community. Ultimately, they do not act to protect her, and in their inaction, they are absent, truly unable to help. The audience is left with the question: Like these characters, what have we left undone? What ethics surround the absence of acting in response to another’s need?

    At the centre of this searing drama of bigotry and transcendence is the brutal dehumanization of the other – of both the bully and the victim. The outcome challenges the Roman Catholic church’s response to the same-sex marriage rulings in Canada. Leave of Absence won the ACTivist theatre Amnesty International Playwright contest in 2011.

    Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateApr 15, 2012
    ISBN9780889227545
    Leave of Absence
    Author

    Lucia Frangione

    Lucia Frangione is an internationally produced, award-winning playwright and actor. Grazie is her debut novel. She is the winner of the Sydney Risk playwriting award, the Gordon Armstrong playwriting award, the CAEA emerging artist award and the NY Unknown Country award, and she is among the top three on the Flannery List (as featured in American Magazine, October 5, 2021). Her thirty-three plays have been produced across Canada and in cities like London, Warsaw, San Diego, Boston, and Chicago. She is a member of ACTRA and CAEA. Lucia is currently working on a sequel to Grazie and is also developing a play called Danger to Self and Others with Touchstone Theatre. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and two children. www.luciafrangione.com

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      Book preview

      Leave of Absence - Lucia Frangione

      9780889227545.jpg6418.jpg

      Contents

      Foreword

      Preface

      Acknowledgements

      Production History

      The Community

      The Time and Place

      Performance Note

      ACT ONE

      ACT TWO

      Lucia Frangione

      Other Plays by Lucia Frangione

      Copyright Information

      For Father Rob Repicky,

      Michael Kopsa,

      and Dr. Michael Davenport

      – three inspiring and present fathers

      Foreword

      Leave of Absence is a complex story that forces the reader out of the black and white and into the grey of life. And like most thought-provoking and visceral writing, it is filled with paradox.

      Lucia Frangione is a writer who is not afraid to live in the uneasy place of paradox. Her authentic voice delivers validity to points of view that don’t often share the same page. She illustrates the sacred in what to many readers seems profane. She pinpoints the soul-journey of the individual within the context of community. She understands love in people many would deem to be unlovable.

      Frangione’s work is inspired by primal expressions of humanity while reaching for transcendence. She is a writer of rare spirit, driven by the need to articulate the cravings of the soul within limitations of our everyday experience. What happens when day-to-day existence renders the soul hollow? How do people of principle find their spiritual and communal mooring in such a place? This play explores these questions through scenes rooted in primal acts of innocent curiosity, violence, communal upheaval, and love.

      There is nothing more wonderful than a story that reveals complex humanity. Leave of Absence is such a story.

      – Morris Ertman

      Director

      Preface

      Most of us would say we have done nothing purposefully to cause a child harm. We read about Amanda Todd or Jamie Hubley in the news and can’t even imagine participating in such horrific persecution. How does this even happen in our society and why are children killing each other or themselves? I had washed my own hands clean all my life until I started asking myself: What have I not done to protect a child? How have I have been absent?

      This play is about a small, loving community who all, in their own way, help raise a child. It’s full of humour, sensuality, and mysticism. It contains some of my experiences as a fourteen-year-old girl, including some of my prayer poetry from that time. It was inspired originally by the experiences my friend Rob Repicky shared with me: being a priest in Toronto for more than twenty years. But the play also goes to a place I’ve never gone before. It is my own leave – of absence.

      Every year children and young adults looking for a person to talk to find me through Facebook (social media can also do some good). Why me? My God, I don’t know. I’m entirely unqualified. But I guess I am unafraid to ask questions about faith and sexuality in my work, so that’s a start. They pour out their anguish over being bullied, excluded, or shamed by others and by the voice in their own head.

      Many of them are from a religious community, so the threat isn’t just emotional and physical but also spiritual. Some of these kids and adults haven’t yet been sexually active. Almost all confess they have tried to kill themselves or feel they may someday. We have conversations that last for years sometimes. Some lose their faith. I’ve seen others become sexually inert – for decades. Still others are able to hold on to a faith while living and loving as someone other than straight.

      When John Patrick Shanley was asked why he left the question of Father Flynn’s innocence open in his play Doubt, he wrote: What I’m not interested in is writing polemics on one side of an issue or another. Doubt does not have to dismantle passion. It can be a passionate exercise.

      In Leave of Absence, I share with you five people. I share with you five different viewpoints. I share with you five different ways to love. Within this, I ask the questions: Where is the absence? How does a child slip through our hands?

      The answer to these questions, only you know for your life. And in asking them, I do what I can to catch a child from falling.

      – Lucia Frangione

      December 9, 2012

      Acknowledgements

      This play was developed with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Gordon Armstrong Playwright’s Rent Award, Pacific Theatre, David McFazdean and family, Playwrights Theatre Centre, Alberta Theatre Projects, and Lamb’s Players Theatre (San Diego). Many thanks to Rob Repicky for sharing his experiences as a priest. Thank you also to Michael Kopsa for inspiring me to write this play and to physicist Dr. Michael Davenport for the insight into science and the spiritual. Special thanks to D. D. Kugler, my dramaturge, and to ACTivist Theatre Collective, who produced a thirty-minute version of the script at the Vancouver International Fringe Festival in September 2011.

      Production History

      Leave of Absence premiered at Pacific Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia, on January 25, 2013, with the following cast:

      FATHER RYAN: Tom McBeath

      BLAKE: Karyn Guenther

      GRETA: Lucia Frangione

      MARTHA (MISS WOODS): Marie Russell

      LEAP (FILIPP): Craig Erickson

      Artistic direction by Ron Reed

      Produced by Alison Chisholm

      Publicity by Andrea Loewen

      Production management by Frank Nickel

      Technical direction by Jessica Howell

      Directed by Morris Ertman

      Dramaturgy by D. D. Kugler

      Stage managed by Jethelo E. Cabilete

      Set designed by Drew Facey

      Lighting designed by Lauchlin Johnston

      Sound designed by Jeff Tymoschuk and Jim Hodgkinson

      Properties managed by Linsy Rotar

      Costumes

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