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    Pig Girl
    Pig Girl
    Pig Girl
    Ebook110 pages48 minutes

    Pig Girl

    By Colleen Murphy

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    About this ebook

    At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9781770914483
    Pig Girl
    Author

    Colleen Murphy

    Colleen Murphy is an award-winning author who was born in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and has since relocated to Toronto. Her plays include The December Man (L'homme de décembre)—winner of the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama, the Carol Bolt Award, and the Alberta Theatre Projects Enbridge playRites Award—Beating Heart Cadaver, The Goodnight Bird, and The Piper, among others. She is also a librettist (The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G.) and an award-winning filmmaker whose distinct films have played in festivals around the world. For more information, visit colleenmurphy.ca.

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      Book preview

      Pig Girl - Colleen Murphy

      **** / ****  . . . a deeply feminist, profoundly political work.

      —Alex Ramon, Public Reviews, London UK

      There are many moments when Dying Woman horrifies the Killer as much as he her. She dispenses curses of damnation like the queens of Richard III. ‘I’m gonna smear my blood all over the city . . . Crawl inside me ’cause I’m your coffin.’ The dynamic is compulsively watchable, and impossible to watch.

      —Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal

      Murphy’s work is refreshingly unpredictable. She is a keen observer, a shrewd and independent-minded analyst. And a terrific writer, with un-showy, economical dialogue, and tightly structured action . . . Building tension, never sensationalising, or exploiting the suffering of the victim she shows—a bright student sunk into drug-addiction and lured to the farm by promises of new pharmaceuticals—Murphy gives depth to each character.

      —Timothy Ramsdon, ReviewsGate, London UK

      Pig Girl

      Colleen Murphy

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Also by Colleen Murphy

      Armstrong’s War

      Beating Heart Cadaver

      The December Man (L’homme de décembre)

      The Goodnight Bird

      The Piper

      Contents

      Author’s Preface
      Production History
      Characters
      Note
      THE BEGINNING
      Afterword
      Acknowledgements
      About the Author
      Copyright

      Author’s Preface

      In 2010 a serial killer was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder, but the remains or DNA of a further twenty-seven women were found on his pig farm outside the city of Vancouver. Total indifference from the Vancouver Police Department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police toward the missing women—many of them Indigenous— contributed to the police forces’ utter failure to stop the carnage.

      Although these events served as a catalyst for Pig Girl, the play itself is a work of imagination. While drawing on some facts to create fictional characters, I have made no attempt to give a factual account and any resemblance to real people is not intentional.

      My intention is not to exploit women who have been murdered or who have gone missing, or to feed off the pain of families or friends who have been devastated by real events, but to use real events as a point of departure in order to make people see, acknowledge, and care enough to take action, to care enough for a woman they never knew and perhaps would not want to know, to care enough to ask why—

      WHY

      ?

      Why do some women find themselves in such vulnerable situations? What have they endured to make them so vulnerable? Why do some men fear and hate women, and what have they endured to make them into predators? And why does society, including people in authority, refuse to acknowledge this recurrent pattern of abuse?

      In theatre a play becomes most meaningful if the victim asserts agency and the predator has motivation. In nature the predator/prey relationship is a part of the natural cycle; in human relationships it is simply not tolerated, but I cannot but believe it still has a basis in cause and effect.

      In order to understand their motivations and actions, I created characters that, to a greater or lesser degree, I care about—no matter how heinous their actions—and to care about them means to witness the horror, and in the case of the Dying Woman, to witness her heroic refusal to submit to the horror visited upon her.

      Pig Girl is an extreme tragedy. Some audience members came out of Theatre Network in Edmonton shaken to their core and some shouted outrage while others were unable to stop crying or get up out of their seats when it was over, because everyone who watched the play had to face an extreme situation on the stage. The great playwright Edward Bond said, "If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you eventually end up in Hiroshima itself." I take Bond’s words to mean that if we cannot face our own human catastrophes in the theatre to try to gain some insight into why they happened then we risk repeating them.

      The terrible events on that farm shone a further light on the murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada—both constitute human catastrophes—North American examples of the hatred of and violence against women that exist across the world; a violence that must be seen and confronted.

      One of the lines the Dying Woman says is,  . . . turn your head an’ see me.

      She is not asking; she is demanding.

      —Colleen Murphy

      Pig Girl was first produced at Theatre Network in Edmonton in November 2013 with the following cast and creative team:

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