Playwright's Notes
Jean Claude tells the tale of how at one time, elephants were the size of gophers
I have to admit that even in its initial form as a short-story called An Elephant Memory, I was never interested in retelling the somewhat overwrought narrative of Canada’s conflicting two solitudes. In my opinion too much emphasis on the age old conflict between the English and the French would detract from the real heart of the play and, frankly make the piece less thematically universal. I wanted the audience to share a visceral experience of the conflict between memory and reality, between nostalgia and progress, between stasis and change, between cultural preservation and cultural Darwinism. In the end I wanted to examine the questions of what is truly worth holding on to and what is necessary to let go? Or furthermore how does nostalgia impede progress and how does progress eliminate our connection with the past? On a very personal level, Elephant Wake is my coming of age story. It grew out of a moment when I realized I was no longer a boy and that myself and the place I grew up in was rapidly evolving into something different. This self-reflective epiphany, where I balanced precariously between the future and the past, was very profound for me, as it was a complex moment of beauty, fear, sadness, and joy. It is precisely the essence of this moment that spawned the character of Jean Claude. With his child-like simplicity, he is able to live forever in a space where the past, the present and the future are one and the same. He has not grown up. So despite the incredible amount of loss and solitude that defines his world, he is still able to defy despair by populating his community with wonderful old memories and cling to an unbreakable sense of hope. This quality becomes both an admirable feat of innocence and a sorrowful tragic flaw. In post-colonial Canada, I think we can all identify with Jean Claude’s condition. All of us have experienced loss of some kind, whether that is a loss of our power and privilege, a loss of our cultural identity, a loss of our language, or a loss of a our way of life. We all know what it means to stand in awe before change and progress, and feel both incredibly excited and horribly frightened. What will be lost? What will be gained? What do we carry with us, and what do we discard? Who will win? And who will lose? Will we all experience progress equally and if not how will we treat those left behind? It is these questions which compelled me to revisit and rework this ten year old script. Intuitively, I felt that deep within the central metaphor lived a theme that felt so applicable to the modern Canadian experience: a theme that went far beyond the old conflict between two ancient European cultures; a theme that spoke directly to what we are now and what we are becoming.
Joey Tremblay, playwright
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