The One True Dave

This Is For You, Anna: A Spectacle of Revenge

By Maureen White, Barb Taylor, Tori Smith, Banuta Rubess, Ann Marie MacDonald, Suzanne Odette Khuri

Genre: Collectively created non-linear social action documentary theatre.

Year: 1984/85 though it went through several stages of development.

The Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia has a good entry on this play.  I will paste it below.  This play was created over two or three years and many workshop productions before the text as printed in CTR and Alan Filewod’s anthology emerged.  The non-linear structure of the piece allows for affective associations and the inclusion of a variety of perspectives in a piece that could easily be didactically Brechtian or ploddingly realistic in traditional form.  The company of artists that created this piece, following in the collective/documentary footsteps of Paul Thompson and also (probably) influenced by the feminist collective work of Monstrous Regiment (Caryl Churchill, etc), wished to create and tell the story of Marianne Bachmeier and her daughter Anna in a non-linear non-patriarchal non-climatic way.  I hadn’t read this play before now and found it to be very interesting in its juxtaposition of elements – textual and visual.  The full impact of this piece, of course, would come with viewing a production.  The words on the page only provide a sketch of how affective I think it could be – especially in an intimate space.  At the end of the play the ensemble specifically thanks an early audience of 17.  I can understand how this could be an extremely powerful intimate show.

This play gives voice to a subject that is rarely dealt with in theatre – the plight of a mother struggling to support herself and her child in a male society.  What recourse did Marianne Bachmeier have to achieve justice in a world where she had never seen justice favor her before.  The fact she felt her only recourse was to act herself is indicative of a system where she felt she had no agency otherwise.  The material included in the show from the letters to Ms. Bachmeier were particularly poignant.  She was not the only woman who felt powerless.

Here is the CTE entry:

Feminist collective creation in one long act subtitled “A Spectacle of Revenge” created by The Anna Project (Suzanne Odette Khuri, Ann-Marie MacDonald , Banuta Rubess, Maureen White), premiered at Nightwood Theatre , 1985.

As there was, in Quebec, Les fées ont soif and La nef des sorcières , so, too, did English Canada have key feminist theatrical works, many born at Nightwood Theatre. This work discusses several important issues in a non-linear style: the nature of revenge and how the wronged deal with their trauma (men kill, women kill themselves); rape; domestic violence; child abuse; motherhood etc. It does so in prosaic and theatrical forms which sometimes meld nicely and sometimes seem beside the point. There are instances in the work when it seems to be tackling all the ills of the universe without serving any one particularly well.

Inspired by a true story – Marianne Bachmeier who shot the murderer of her seven-year-old daughter, Anna, in the courtroom as he tried to blame Anna for flirting with him – the play is much more a performer’s and director’s piece as the text itself has not aged well.