Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth got its start with an earlier play of mine called Someday, a play dealing with what Native people call the “scoop up,” when Native kids were taken away for adoption – too often with tragic results. I had never intended to write Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, assuming Someday would say it all for me. Evidently, I was wrong.
I am a firm believer that sometimes a story is not quite finished. At the end of Someday, the ambiguity of the ending somehow felt right, but somewhere deep inside I wondered if this was truly the end of the Wabung saga? Does Janice really walk out on the family forever? What are the repercussions of this action? Does it have to be this way?
During the rehearsals for the first production of Someday in the fall of 1991, I was in the midst of a conversation with Larry Lewis, the director. At the end of the play, Janice/Grace, the adoptee, leaves her birth family and returns to Toronto in tears, unable to face all the emotions being forced to the surface. Larry asked me if I thought Janice/Grace would ever return. I responded that it would have to be something awfully important or persuasive to bring her back, knowing the kind of painful emotional experience she was going through. I offhandedly made a comment like “Maybe a funeral or something. Maybe the mother dies.”
It was then that I saw a familiar gleam in Larry’s eyes, one that said his mind was already working out the possibilities feverishly. We spent the next hour talking about those possibilities. So Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth was born in a messy kitchen, in a trailer located on the Wikwemikong Reserve, Manitoulin Island.
But as is my process, I let the idea ferment in my mind, along with all the other plays I was thinking about, for about a year and a half. As it was, I was in the middle of writing another play that was proving to be, shall we say, somewhat difficult. I decided to take a break and finally write Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth. The first draft took me four and a half days.
In approaching this play, I didn’t want to rehash all the arguments and points I had explored in Someday. Instead, I wanted fresh territory to develop and dramatize. Initially, the first play had been about the family learning their long-lost daughter was coming home again after thirty-five years. It was the mother’s and the family’s story.
Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth was Janice/Grace’s story. Someday showed that you can’t overcome thirty-five years in one hour. All things important and necessary take time. Repatriation, reunification, whatever you want to call it, takes commitment and resolve. And the road is not always smooth. I felt Janice wasn’t as sympathetic in Someday as she could have been. It was time for Janice to have her day and face her demons. I was lucky enough to be a part of her journey. And poor Barb, the real rock of the family, needed to get some stuff off her chest, too. She was in as much pain, in a different way, as Janice.
I also wanted this play to stand on its own, separate and complete. It would have been foolish of me to make Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth dependent on Someday. This play has been called a clash of wills, of cultures, of philosophies if you will. I think it’s a story of two sisters finding each other. But as always, you will be the judges.
– Drew Hayden Taylor
Toronto, December 1997