Synopsis

Jennie's Story is set in the late 1930s on the Canadian prairies. It concerns the Sexual Sterilization Act that was enacted in 1928, allowing a sterilization procedure to be performed without consent on individuals that were deemed to be unfit or mentally challenged. Jennie McGrane takes the title role, and her discovery of what the priest Father Fabrizeau has done to her is the central drama of the play. Believing she had an appendectomy when she was a teenager, the truth is revealed when she's unable to conceive. This was one of Lambert's latter works, and among her finest. In 1999, it was adapted into an independent film by Kim Hogan.

Winner of the 1983 Chalmers Canadian Play Award.

Theatrical Productions

1. The New Play Centre, Canadian Theatre Conference in Sasksatoon, Saskatchewan, and the Waterfront Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia, October 1981.

2. CentreStage Company, St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, April 1983.

Directed by Bill Glassco
Designed by Sue Le Page
Stage Managed by Catherine Russell
JENNIE McGrane	Nora McLellan
HARRY McGrane	Michael Hogan
FATHER Edward Fabrizeau	William Mockridge
EDNA Delevault	Clare Coulter
MOLLY Dorval	Denise Naples

 

3. Many subsequent productions both within and outside of Canada.

Reviews

"...[an] ambitious play [that] transports us into another era, and into different levels of reality."
     -Vancouver Courier

"This haunting story from Western Canada in the '30s is a fine one and will undoubtedly become a minor classic of contemporary Canadian Theatre...a must for every lover of good theatre."
     -Jim Costley, Burlington School Board

"Jennie's Story, like all good plays, is about more than what happens during two acts of hectic action. It is, as the author suggests, a study of how people respond to their entrapment by beliefs and social attitudes, but it is also, at another level, a play about women as the victims of men and men as the victims of their own mythologies. At all levels it is a powerful, involving and disturbing dramatic event."
     -Christopher Dafoe, The Vancouver Sun

"Prairie tragedy portrayed on Phoenix stage", The Ring, Volume 21, No. 14 , October 13, 1995.

"Needing a baby for Jennie", The Gazette, Volume 90, Issue 91, March 19, 1997.

About the Play

"This story my mother told me (now she tells me it's not the whole story--she's so angry at me for having written it). I grew up on this story about a woman, a girl really, who had worked for the local priest in southern Alberta. On the advice of the priest, she went to Calgary for an operation, thinking that she was having an appendectomy. Years later she married a farmer in the district, and they were very much in love, but she couldn't seem to get pregnant. Finally she went back to the city to find out why she couldn't get pregnant, and she was told that she had had a hysterectomy, at which point she went home and opened a bottle of Armstrong and Hammer lye and mixed it up with some water and drank it. And killed herself.

"That is a story that I had been told since I was a girl, and I knew the husband, so that when I came to write...I mean, it's always bothered me, it's something I knew I'd have to deal with one day. I mean the whole...the Catholic Church. She was obviously sleeping with the priest, and I couldn't figure it out. I thought he would have to have had some kind of legal support to do a thing like that, so I started looking into the statutes on sterlization and they're horrific. B.C. was bad, but Alberta was unbelievable. In Alberta you could be sterilized--and by that they meant hysterectomy--for the transmission of evil, and evil was loosely defined as anything from pauperism to alcoholism, to feeble-mindedness. The figures are incredible, and this was not changed until 1971."

-from an interview with Betty Lambert

Bibiliography

Lambert, Betty. (1987). Jennie's Story & Under the Skin. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.

Filmography

Heart of the Sun, 1998, 94 minutes, directed by Francis Damberger, screenplay by Kim Hogan.