So why was I feeling this way? Is it because Ivany’s characters Jimmy and Murph and Mary in “Cookstown” felt so familiar to me? Or because the darkness of their lives—maybe fittingly—also felt so stage-y and insistent upon itself? Was it because these characters felt both like they hold a likeness to people I’ve known and still know from when and where I grew up, yet also like caricatures of those people? This is not necessarily a criticism: there’s an element of satire and farce to these plays that creates a kind of distancing from the action. A sense that the jokes between these characters refer to the bigger joke being played on us, the middle-class readers of the work. Crushed by poverty, addiction, and violence—systemic and otherwise—each of Jimmy, Murph, and Mary nevertheless seem more than happy to wise-crack their way through their own brutalization and hardship, as though they know they’re performing for an audience. An audience, not of skeets like they are, but of an elevated level of class and education and most of all, good taste. A bawdy bit of gritty theatre for them what’s right proper and strait-laced, hey b’y.

Maybe I felt sad  because Jane in “Cashin Avenue” finds herself in a predicament I’ve witnessed personally. How she feels—trying to extricate herself from an abusive and violent relationship—both like a stand-in in the play, and ultimately, its victim: a kind of double-brutalization. Or is my sadness because Johnny and Mikey—day-passers from the Waterford Hospital in “Bowring Park”—are, as Mikey puts it, in a turn of stark near-poetry, “broken little losers with broken little brains”? Maybe that’s it. Maybe, in a meta-fictive turn of self-criticality, Ivany is suggesting here that Newfoundland identity itself is a fiction. A bad case of rubber-bootery. A theatrical reinterpretation of Joan Morrisey’s invention of the Screech-In, and the extra bucks that come with it. Maybe Ivany’s interrogation of class and masculinity posits that to a very large degree, Newfoundlanders’ collective identity as tough, hard-scrabble truth-tellers in the face of Canada’s famed uptight politeness, is itself a myth. An instance of a population performing its own culture, performing its own identity with no sense of the truth beneath the performance. The answer is nebulous. Job to say, as they say, but there are strains here of Percival Everett’s Erasure. 

But maybe, like me, Darren Ivany is an addict in recovery. Maybe, like me, he grew up in poverty. Maybe, like me, his childhood friends and his family are sporadically on income support, unemployed, incarcerated, or otherwise institutionalized. Maybe, like me, he grew up witness to familial violence. It’s possible he himself or a family member of his has spent a not inconsiderable amount of time in the Waterford Hospital and therefore can speak accurately and with insight about mental illness and addiction and poverty. Or maybe none of that is the case, and, in the writing of Home In Three Plays, Ivany undertook a program of deep, sincere, and sensitive primary research with those whose plight he sought to portray. Unfortunately for us all, there are an increasing number of people in the city struggling with such things. Whatever the case may be, Ivany’s Home In Three Plays causes the reader to examine their own prejudices, their own assumptions, and to question whose interests those prejudices and assumptions ultimately serve, and, perhaps most importantly, why.

Craig Francis Power is an artist and writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). Total Party Kill, his collection of poetry exploring addiction and sobriety through the imagery of Dungeons & Dragons, was published by Breakwater Books in 2024.