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    Bordertown Café
    Bordertown Café
    Bordertown Café
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Bordertown Café

    By Kelly Rebar

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    About this ebook

    In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offers Jimmy the prosperity of his new American home, a large modern house fully equipped with everything, including a capable new wife. In contrast, Jimmy’s mom, Marlene, is a failed wife and a weak, ­tentative mother. The home she has made for herself and her son “on the Canadian side of nowhere” is provisional and shabby: half finished, ill equipped, badly decorated.

    Jimmy’s conflict is writ large as the play dramatizes Canada’s struggle to negotiate a unique identity in the shadow of its brash, superpower neighbour. Although global realities have shifted in the decades since the play’s inception, its themes of personal and cultural identity endure.

    Cast of 2 women and 2 men.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateFeb 25, 2015
    ISBN9780889229372
    Bordertown Café
    Author

    Kelly Rebar

    Winner of the 1990 CAA for Drama, Bordertown Café is set in a café on the Canadian side of the Alberta/Montana border. This comedy-drama is about a family whose members are torn between their unrealized goals and dreams, and family obligations. It was made into a feature film by Cinexus/Famous Players and directed by Norma Bailey from a screenplay by Rebar, who received a Genie Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Bordertown Café has been widely produced in theatres across Canada, including Theatre New Brunswick, Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, London’s Grand Theatre, Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange, Regina’s Globe Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Vancouver Arts Club Theatre. Some of Rebar’s other plays include Cornflower Blue (Memories from a Prairie Childhood), which like Bordertown Café was commissioned by the Blyth Theatre Festival and toured throughout Ontario and Manitoba. First Snowfall was written when Rebar was playwright in residence at Alberta Theatre Projects and was produced by Theatre Network. Checkin’ Out, a comedy-drama about a small town check out girl, was commissioned by Northern Lights Theatre in 1981 and produced by them before going on to productions in Ottawa, Vancouver, Thunder Bay and at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, where it remains their most successful production to date. After spending time in Washington, DC, Rebar became playwright in residence for Prairie Theatre Exchange and wrote a play for them, All Over the Map, which they toured throughout Manitoba and parts of Ontario. It was then produced by Chinook Theatre in Edmonton. Rebar’s first play, Chatter, was produced when she was just 17, at Calgary’s Factory Theatre West. That same year she was part of the first Playwright’s Colony at the Banff Centre. Rebar also writes for television and film and has several screenwriting and story editing credits to her name. She has written for the NFB, the CBC, Atlantis Films, Sullivan Entertainment, Shaftesbury Productions, for the television series Wind At My Back and Jake and the Kid. She has adapted several of Alice Munro’s short stories, including the television feature based on Lives of Girls and Women. Rebar makes her home in Nelson, BC.

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      Book preview

      Bordertown Café - Kelly Rebar

      CHARACTERS

      JIMMY, age seventeen

      MARLENE, Jimmy’s mother, age thirty-four

      MAXINE, Marlene’s mother, age fifty-seven

      JIM, Marlene’s father, age sixty-two

      SETTING

      A café on the Canadian side of the Alberta-Montana border. The present [late 1980s.]

      SET

      The kitchen and customer service area of the café. It is a kitchen that bridges public and private use. In addition to the trays of dishes and cups, ketchup bottles and relish jars, the lard can, the grill and work area, a small kitchen table with chairs, magazines, bills, and a paperback or two indicate this kitchen is a family centre. The café is old but very clean, organized in its own way. An order window and a swinging door stand at the front of the café. A screen door leads outside. A door or passageway opens to the back suite. JIMMY’s bedroom either introduces the back suite, and one must pass through his room to get to the back, or it is in some way shown to be a room without privacy. The single bed takes up most of the space. Typical teenage boy things are about, and again, there is a tidiness. The closed, tight space of the café is contrasted by a sense of overwhelming prairie sky that surrounds the set.

      ACT ONE

      The sound of a combine harvester approaching. The sun begins to rise. JIMMY is asleep in his bed. Light enters the kitchen and lends a photographic quality to the place, as if things have been caught in time. The sound of the combine reaches a point, then begins to fade away. As the sound fades, the sunrise approaches its peak. Just as the light seems to hold still, the sound of the combine ceases. JIMMY snaps awake. He gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen to look out through the screen door. The sun carries on, the kitchen loses its quality, and things appear functional. JIMMY goes back to his room and goes back to bed. The sound of a meadowlark is heard. The phone rings. It rings again.

      JIMMY

      Am I getting that, Mum?

      MARLENE enters from the back suite, doing up her robe. She crosses to the phone in the kitchen.

      MARLENE

      (answering) We’re awake, Mum. (realizing her error) Oh hi. You comin’ up? Yeah, ’cept for he’s got school startin’ today, eh.

      JIMMY

      (immediately) No, I don’t, Friday’s just registration.

      MARLENE

      What about?

      JIMMY

      What about what about?

      MARLENE

      Oh.

      Pause.

      JIMMY

      Oh what, Mum?

      MARLENE

      If that’s what he wants.

      JIMMY

      If he’s pickin’ me up for a haul, I can’t go with him, Granddad and me got a crop to get off.

      MARLENE

      Just sec. (to JIMMY) Am I tryna talk?

      JIMMY

      There’s certain considerations.

      MARLENE

      (back to the phone) Up to him.

      JIMMY

      (throwing the covers back) Wait – wait –

      MARLENE

      ’Kay then, bye.

      JIMMY freezes, then falls back to bed. MARLENE hangs up, keeping her hand on the receiver a spell. She crosses to the little kitchen table and lights a cigarette. The sound of a tanker truck gearing by and fading away. MARLENE waits for it to go. The light makes another transition.

      MARLENE

      Get up, Jimmy.

      JIMMY

      Where’s he at?

      MARLENE crosses to the door to look out. Pause.

      JIMMY

      Well, if he’s just leaving Wyoming now he won’t reach the border ’til way past –

      MARLENE

      Bring me out my curling iron.

      MARLENE goes back to the table to place her cigarette down in the ashtray.

      JIMMY

      Is my dad just leaving Wyoming now, I says.

      MARLENE

      I’m not beatin’ around the bush. I’m gettin’ right to the point. Your dad’s – just leaving Wyoming now.

      MARLENE takes a quarter from the tip jar and looks toward Jimmy’s room.

      And not only that he got married.

      She starts to exit to the front, stopping briefly.

      Make your bed.

      She exits. JIMMY jumps out of bed and throws on his jeans. A song comes on the jukebox from out front. JIMMY goes to the kitchen to wait for MARLENE to re-enter.

      JIMMY

      (hollering to the front) And here I didn’t even know he was goin’ with her!

      He realizes the giveaway of his lie and hollers louder to cover it.

      He say who to?!

      MARLENE comes back in, heading for the back suite.

      MARLENE

      (as if it is all one word) No, he never – Linda Somebody.

      MARLENE sets to making Jimmy’s bed. JIMMY follows her into his room to take over from her, but MARLENE finishes any job she starts and JIMMY is forced to watch, guilt-ridden and idle.

      JIMMY

      Well, it don’t matter to me, does it matter to you? He got married?

      MARLENE

      (disguised) Does it look like it matters to me? (continues with the bed)

      JIMMY

      (watching) Well, that’s great.

      MARLENE

      Colour hair she got?

      JIMMY starts to answer but doesn’t finish. He watches MARLENE fuss with the bed. He exits back to the suite and returns with a shaving kit and towel. He watches MARLENE fuss with the bedspread. Finally, he speaks.

      JIMMY

      Quit makin’ that bed!

      MARLENE

      I knew it! Every time your dad comes up to Canada, I end up gettin’ yelled at! And I know I shoulda got you a new bedspread four, five years ago, but I didn’t!

      JIMMY

      What!

      MARLENE

      Didn’t, Jimmy, didn’t. Should change it to my name, Marlene Didn’t. Didn’t wanna fix this place up ’cause why would a person wanna sock a bunch of money into a back suite when she’s gonna buy the Mathison place when it comes up for sale? Mathison place comes up for sale, did I buy it – ? No, I didn’t. I don’t have the Mathison place and I don’t have the fixed-up back suite and now you’re – and he’s – and this is for a little boy, this bedspread, it’s for a little boy.

      Pause.

      JIMMY

      Did Dad say what time he was gettin’ here?

      MARLENE

      Four!

      JIMMY

      Four?

      MARLENE

      And you’re standing there tellin’ me she’s got me beat all to heck, this gal.

      JIMMY

      I got conditioning at four.

      MARLENE

      I know that without ever layin’ eyes on her.

      JIMMY

      No, Mum.

      MARLENE

      Eh?

      JIMMY

      Don’t think that.

      MARLENE

      Well, this is it. How does he think he could do better’n me with the kinda girls he ’sociates with? Answer me that. Oh, those American girls, don’t tell me about American girls, I lived down there, I know exactly what they’re capable of down there.

      JIMMY

      This is mattering, Dad getting married.

      MARLENE

      No it isn’t mattering and I’ll tell you why it is. (pause) See Jimmy, uh.

      JIMMY

      What?

      MARLENE

      I – I – I’m not sayin’ it’s any great shakes

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