review ï PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB Ð Anna Chatterton
Shy, fourteen-year-old Maddie wasn’t expecting to have to worry about taking care of herself just yet. Her sixteen-year-old party-girl sister Bea has scandalously moved in with their mom’s ex-boyfriend, and in turn, their brassy mother Sheila has run straight to the comfort of another lover. Maddie is finding that an empty apartment is quiet and lonely, even though her time is normally spent reading comics in her closet. Feeling abandoned and vulnerable, she turns to her favourite superhero, Arrowette. Armed with a backpack filled with a bow and arrows, she embarks on a radical plan to join the army, where she thinks she will find a new family she can count on.
Meanwhile, Bea is second-guessing the whole dating an older man thing, and Sheila defends her unorthodox sexual candour, entertaining the ideals of freedom. When Bea and Sheila decide to come home for Maddie’s birthday, they’re faced with the pointed arrow of Maddie’s newfound power and the startling reality of the kind of family they’ve become. Quiver author Anna Chatterton
I listened to this on the PlayMe podcast, with Anna Chatterton performing.
Chatterton is a master of character and voice. She flips seamlessly between the three characters voiced in the piece, and plays them against each other well. A touching and personal family drama, I appreciate the glimpse into the inner workings--the cause and effect--of what makes this such a dysfunctional family.
However, I feel there is something missing in the plot structure. The piece sets up problem after problem with absentee parenting, statutory rape-relations and a girl who struggles to find herself. The play ramps up gradually, and then fiercely towards what might be a violent or confrontational or meaningful ending. But in the end the family comes back together, seemingly unchanged. What have the characters learned from the play? What changes? The play is not worth it--to me--if the central conflict of the piece is never resolved, and the characters don't change. I don't need Maddie to shoot anyone with her arrow, nor do I need Sheila to bare her soul to the family. But something is missing from the end. Something essential. Then again, maybe that's how life goes sometimes. Anna Chatterton