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    Mouthpiece
    Mouthpiece
    Mouthpiece
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Mouthpiece

    By Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2017 Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best New Canadian Play
    Winner of three Dora Mavor Moore Awards
    Stage Award for Best Performance, 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

    Mouthpiece follows one woman, for one day, as she tries to find her voice. Two performers express the inner conflict that exists within a modern woman's head: the push and pull, the past and the present, the progress and the regression. Interweaving a cappella harmony, dissonance, text, and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous, and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoach House Books
    Release dateSep 26, 2017
    ISBN9781770565579
    Mouthpiece
    Author

    Norah Sadava

    Co-artistic director of Quote Unquote Collective, Norah Sadava is an award-winning Toronto-based performer and playwright with a background in devised physical theatre.

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      Book preview

      Mouthpiece - Norah Sadava

      copyright © Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, 2017

      first edition

      For production enquiries, please contact Quote Unquote Collective, [email protected].

      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Nostbakken, Amy, author

      Mouthpiece / Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava.

      A play.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-55245-368-1 (softcover).

      I. Sadava, Norah, author II. Title.

      PS8627.O844M68 2018        C812′.6        C2017-906129-1

      Mouthpiece is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 557 9 (EPUB), ISBN 978 1 77056 558 6 (PDF),

      Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)

      For Janis and Anne

      An Introduction

      by Michele Landsberg

      There’s nothing more challenging for a vintage feminist today than to convey the kind of constraints we endured before the so-called Second Wave of feminism came along. The passively accepted tyranny of girldom and boydom that regulated every minute detail of life: only girls had flowers on their birthday cake (flowers were feminine); only boys played sports in any organized way; only boys took second helpings and only boys were comfortable in their own skins. As teenagers, we went along with the choking conformity of clothing; we completely accepted rape jokes and the necessity for girls to laugh merrily at them. We girls inhaled division and restriction with every breath and had no more thought of rejecting sexism than of rejecting breathing itself. Our main task was to be pretty and to attract boys; if that same prettiness and attraction led to our deflowering and hence pregnancy, we might as well kill ourselves, so profound was the social humiliation. Of course, we were also despised as ‘cockteasers’ and accused of leaving boys with the dreaded ‘blue balls’ if we protected our sacred virginity. Double bind? It was our daily life.

      With syncopated movement, song, and spoken (and howled) words, two women – writers and performers Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava – summon up this painful past and our present moment.

      With astonishing fluidity, they evoke an earlier version of femininity and, simultaneously, their own complicated rejection of it. The lead character(s) in the play – two females, both merged into one and also divided – portray a thirty-something contemporary woman who has just awakened, metaphorically voiceless, to the knowledge of her mother’s death and her appalling duty of writing her mother’s eulogy for the imminent funeral.

      The two voices unite and divide in a riveting duet. The women first appear onstage in a bathtub, comically elided – the legs emerging at one end of the tub do not belong to the woman whose head appears at the other. It’s the scene-setting visual joke that prepares us for the complex interplay to come. Both are dressed in plain, white, one-piece bathing suits, making them appear almost more exposed and vulnerable than if they’d been naked.

      The bathtub is a useful prop. Twice the women ask men in the audience – in elaborately high-pitched, cooing, cajoling voices and with mincing steps – to move the bathtub for them. A few seconds later, they’re hefting it lightly and absent-mindedly by themselves.

      As the woman struggles to sum up her mother’s life for the compulsory eulogy – a doormat! So perfectly groomed! Always smiling! She never ate a french fry! All those copies of Vogue magazine! – she is torn between her filial love and her rejection of her mother’s feminine

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