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    Bone Cage
    Bone Cage
    Bone Cage
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    Bone Cage

    By Catherine Banks

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    About this ebook

    Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie's desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.

    Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateJun 26, 2008
    ISBN9781770910348
    Bone Cage
    Author

    Catherine Banks

    Plays by Catherine Banks include Miss N' Me; It Is Solved By Walking; Bone Cage; Three Storey, Ocean View; and Bitter Rose. Bone Cage won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in 2008 and It Is Solved By Walking won the GG 2012. (The latter was translated into Catalan for readings in Catalonia in 2012.) Catherine’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, In This Light, will premiere in July 2019. Her newest plays are an adaptation Ernest Buckler’s iconic novel The Mountain and the Valley, and Downed Hearts.

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      Book preview

      Bone Cage - Catherine Banks

      Cover: Bone Cage by Catherine Banks. Image: A painting of bare white trees at a water line being reflected back in the water. The sky is yellow and orange with blue mountains in the background. Logo: Winner the GGs, Canada Council for the Arts • Governor General’s Literary Awards

      Bone Cage

      By Catherine Banks

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto • Canada

      To my children, Rilla and Simon, with love.

      There are men of the valley

      Who are that valley.

      —Wallace Stevens

      Bone Cage was first produced by Forerunner Playwrights Co-op, in partnership with Ship’s Company Theatre, at the Neptune Studio, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 10–14, 2007 with the following company:

      Jamie

      Michael McPhee

      Chicky

      Kate Lavender*

      Krista

      Caitlin Stewart

      Kevin

      John-Riley O’Handley

      Robby

      Matthew Lumley

      Clarence

      Hugo Dann*

      Lissa

      Sarah English

      Director: Tessa Mendel

      Stage Manager: Kay Robertson*

      Set, Poster and Props Design: Corey Mullins

      Lighting Design: Leigh Ann Vardy with associate Tom Barkley

      Original Score and Sound Design: Terry Pulliam

      Costumes Design: Andrea Ritchie

      Bone Cage was presented as a staged reading at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, on June 16, 2005, as part of On the Verge 2005 with the following company:

      Jamie

      Benjamin Meuser

      Chicky

      Laura Teasdale

      Krista

      Catriona Leger

      Kevin

      Mark Muntean

      Robby

      Daniel Giverin

      Clarence

      Robert Welch

      Lissa

      Rachel Scott-Mignon

      Director: Tessa Mendel

      Stage Manager: Lynn Cox

      Artistic Coordinator: Lise Ann Johnson

      *appeared with permission of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association

      Characters

      Jamie, twenty-two, works a tree processor

      Chicky, twenty-five, Jamie’s half sister, works on the sod fields

      Krista, seventeen, Jamie’s girlfriend, in high school

      Kevin, eighteen, Krista’s brother, works chainsaw

      Clarence, fifty-two, Jamie’s father, on disability

      Robby, thirty, considered slow, works for Chicky’s married lover

      Lissa, fourteen, Robby’s sister, slow

      Note about the Text

      When an italized word appears in brackets it is not meant to be spoken, but rather inform the actor of the character’s feeling at that moment. When one appears at the end of a line following an ellipsis … it is the next word the actor would have spoken.

      Act I

      Scene 1

      Lights up to half. Jamie sits on the rail of a steel bridge painted industrial green.

      Jamie is stroking the body of a dead blue jay. It is early morning and he has just come off the night shift in the tree processor.

      There is the sound of a huge pulp truck travelling on a village road. The sound of it approaching, then the swamped noise of it passing too fast, and too close. The engine accelerates as it struggles up a steep hill and then fades as it leaves the village.

      Jamie

      Oh yeah.

      Everything in its path it eats.

      Yellow birch spruce fir

      White maple

      It picks its teeth with the alders.

      Bitter taste don’t matter.

      Eats squirrels, porkies.

      Mainly birds, lots still in the nests.

      He holds up the jay looking at it carefully.

      Not so safe after all.

      To the tree processor

      I’m the first beer of the day.

      What’s needed to get it started.

      At the end of every shift

      It pisses me out on the ground.

      I saw an eastern ghost once.

      A cougar, watching me in the woods.

      Biologists say cougars don’t exist around here.

      That’s funny because I saw one

      And he saw me too.

      I said,

      You do exist same as me.

      And he said back, There you have it, Jamie-boy.

      When I got a kid someday

      Just born and everything

      I’m going to go raid that fox den

      That I know where it’s at

      And go get a cub.

      Foxes are always black when they’re cubs.

      And I’m going to raise the baby and that fox up together.

      Fox curl up in the crib at night

      Baby play out in the woods all day

      ’Til their hair grows orange.

      And their second teeth?

      Razor sharp.

      Jamie drops the dead bird off the bridge into the river.

      Scene 2

      Lights up.

      Chicky sits next to the river.

      Chicky

      I don’t know how my head gets tired mowing sod fields but it does.

      It hurts all day like when I was waiting for Trav’s next breath, and then the next one.

      There’s this elm tree on the edge of the river

      I mow past fifty times a day.

      It’s dead, been dead for a few years like all the elms.

      This tree looks exactly like a scarred, burnt-out woman.

      An old woman who had twenty kids and they all died of cancer of the brain while she was at the store.

      The branches are broken off ’n what’s left looks like arms thrust over her head, panicked.

      Where her breasts were are these two gaping holes and she’s got a bigger hole that looks like a vagina opening up, only its below her ribs like where Christ was wounded.

      She’s got a face too.

      The peckers have been at her but she got these two eyes and the bark below them is buckled, like a mouth getting ready for a good bellow.

      I told you to stay away from the goddamn river.

      There’s a lot of power in her anyway

      and she’s not too happy with me.

      Rolling up the sod, taking up a layer of soil every time.

      I tell her it’s a job so I can stay.

      She tells me it’s my soul.

      My soul, I tell her, isn’t worth anything.

      She knows that because I’ve told her everything in the last three years as I’ve mowed past her.

      I’ve showed her all my (pause) warts, let’s just say.

      But still she waves those old arms at me

      tells me I’m peeling away my only hope of redemption

      thin layer by thin layer.

      The lights expand to show KRISTA, standing behind Chicky, fumbling with a tightly rolled square of paper. Jamie and Kevin are sitting up on the bridge. The distance is suggested by the fact KRISTA and Chicky must

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