by David S. Craig

Some of us get married, some of us have children, but we all, through no fault of our own, have families. We have them and we either love them or cope with them or apply for a green card. Personally, I think flight is fruitless. My mother, although passed on, is with me 24/7. She sits on my left shoulder. If allowed, she comments on everything I do. Right now, as I write these words, she's telling me not to be "smart". Being "smart" is akin to "showing off" which is right next to being "boastful" which is "rude". She didn't actually say there was a place in hell for 'rude people' (we were United Church after all) but I got that impression. As proof that parents have no influence on their children, I become a professional actor (i.e. a professional show off). To my relief, she was concerned but endlessly supportive. The family you will see tonight isn't mine but it is one I recognize very deeply and I hope you will too. In the writing I have loved them, coped with them and practically raised two children waiting for them to find a place on the stage. I wish my Mother could see them. She would have led the laughter. She'd have been that proud.

My Notes

The character of Russell Bingham, Having Hope at Home is based on Mr. Russell Munro of the 9th line in Beckwith County, in the Ottawa Valley near Carleton Place. When I met him, he was retired after a life of farming, building and working in a feed shop. As a favour, he looked after my grandfather's summer home and when that property passed to my sister and I (when I was about twenty), Mr. Munro came with it. To me, a city kid, he was always a guru. He knew all the trades back to front and could tell me what screw to loosen on the pressure tank and what driver to use to loosen it, never leaving his chair, close to his tea and his Canada Tire catalogue (where everything was too expensive). He cut his own wood, much the way I've described in the play, and took pills for his heart exactly as I've described it. He also thought "the frogs should swim back across the Ottawa River where they belong" but that was because he was angry his unilingual kids couldn't get a job in Ottawa and the bilingual Hull kids could.

There are many Mr. Munro stories. One was about a groundhog. This groundhog had been eating all the plants in our vegetable garden and my sister, the gardener, was really angry. I'd been reading in Harrowsmith the proper way to kill a groundhog. You had to shoot it in the head so it died instantly. Otherwise it would crawl down into its hole and you'd have to dig down to find the animal and put it out of his misery. Anyone who's tried to sink a spade into the soil around the 9th line knows how tough it is to plant a tree let alone dig up a groundhog so I took this advice as gospel and drove over to Mr. Munro's house to borrow a rifle.

"Why do you want a rifle, Dave?" he asked suspiciously. He understood I'd "never been brought up for farm work" (his exact words) and probably didn't believe I knew one end of a rifle from the other (which was a pretty fair assessment). I explained that I needed to practice shooting, so I could kill the groundhog on the first shot, so it wouldn't crawl down into its hole and so I wouldn't have to dig it up and put it out of its misery.

"Oh no, Dave. That's what you want. You want that groundhog to die in its hole. Guarantees you won't have another groundhog down there for a loooooong time."

I went home without the rifle, my wife named the groundhog Hilda and my sister plants vegetables the groundhogs don't like.

Thank you for coming to see Having Hope at Home.

Biography

"One of the top twenty playwrights in Canada."
- Now Magazine.

David S. Craig is currently the Artistic Director of Roseneath Theatre, Ontario's largest touring theatre. David has written more than 20 professionally-produced plays for theatre companies in Canada and the USA and has created two long-running series for CBC Radio: Morning Side and Metro Morning. His one-man show Napalm the Magnificent was performed extensively in Canada and on Theatre Row in Manhattan. He is currently working on a screenplay of his award winning play Danny, King of the Basement, for Instinct Films.