Pedlar Press, 2007
read by Melissa Bull
“I think… this might sound crazy… I think, in the van, they have a machine: radio waves or microwaves. They have a machine that’s making me feel ill.”
“Families are Formed Through Copulation” is concisely written theatre that churns out accounts of guilt, fear, disengagement and despair without the self-indulgence of mellow-drama. “Families” is quite unlike Montreal’s damp winters. It’s cold, but it’s a dry cold.
“Sometimes at school I would mention a few ideas (…) something about the American government or about the CIA or the wars. And the response would almost always be the same. (…) Basically every single time, after a short, sad pause, they would gently change the topic, saying only: ‘I can’t talk about that. It makes me too depressed’.”
The play – that can easily be read as a series of short stories – is told from a tilting cups and saucers kind of point of view. It spins from first-person to third to a different first. A structure that focuses the reader into empathy for each character and objectivity for the narratives.
Wren’s work expresses to what extent the ties of love and lust are what make us hoard into capitalism, close our eyes, try to cotton-batten our existence and recycle idealism into unblinking bourgeoisie. They are meditations on the harm we inflict, on the way our very individuation wrenches us into more violence. For an antidote to what’s been done to us, for distraction from the pain we cause, for a way of being in nothingness.
“But every time someone says that to me – that I’m cynical – I experience this really visceral thing: an unpleasant little jolt, almost like an electrical shock, right at the centre of my being. (…) I have such an achingly lucid sense of idealism, real idealism. It’s clear to me that things could be so much better than they are, so much better than they will ever be.”
Wait: “Families” is about a couple of kids who hitch a ride to a show but don’t get there. “Families” is about a Jewish guy who makes out with the daughter of a former Nazi. “Families” is about a person paranoid he is being followed by a white van. “Families” is about someone who isn’t born yet. Sometimes it even goes a little screwy with the sci-fi. A rich document. Wren’s stories are solitudes strung up like worry beads, or an unlikely rosary.
