SummerWorks Performance Festival is all about new and adventurous works, offering a diverse and boundary blurring assortment of performances. Now, in its 26th year, the program includes 69 original pieces spanning theatre, music, live art, dance and more. In this series, we talk to this year’s emerging artists.

For this installment, we spoke with the writer of Plucked, Rachel Ganz.

SDTC: What’s your play about?

RG: Plucked is about a farm where the women turn into chickens and the men farm their eggs. The show opens on the day Abigail, the farm’s maternal figure, has “turned” chicken. The pressure is set for her daughter to find a way off the farm before she turns chicken as well. Ultimately, the show investigates fear as a pervasive influence in a woman’s life.

My favourite aspect of the play is the picture of family life. I love the wicked spin it takes on the sort of pastoral farm and patriarchal order of rural smoky etiquette. To me, there’s so much that’s true about Fourteen (the daughter) and her need to escape, her adolescent assurance that she knows everything and everything is bad but if she could just get away…it’s a very personal play. It’s just littered with lies.

How’d you conceive this idea?

Plucked was conceived when I was in my first year at the National Theatre School of Canada. I was struggling through bouts of anxiety and panic and, when forced to perform a “deepening” movement exercise wherein we close our eyes and move impulsively around a room, I suddenly envisioned a half woman/half chicken and I knew I had to write about her. The metaphor didn’t become clear until a year later but, as I got to know Abigail. I knew she needed a voice.

What are the biggest challenges? Biggest rewards?

As usual with my work, I find it frustrating to have to explain my concepts to my collaborators. I hardly know specifically what the heck I’m writing about or why it’s expressed in a particular image or absurdity. Questions of “Why” usually frustrate me and it’s certainly been no different for the “chicken lady play.” But, as usual, working with Carly [the director] is always rewarding because I trust her; I hand the play to her without doubt or expectation or criteria and she always delivers. So far, she’s cast it wonderfully, she’s designed a stunning visual campaign, it’s just always rewarding to witness her “getting it” because she does so in such a profound way.

What do you want audiences to take away? 

All I ever hope for is that the audience leaves feeling that they’ve witnessed an event. I hope for that feeling of “Can that happen? Why did that happen? I can’t believe that happened.” I hope we grip people, suck everyone in enough so that by the end, once “it’s happened,” the audience feels, viscerally, that they were there. Throughout, it’s funny but ultimately it isn’t so: I hope everyone walks away with a new awareness of hidden crises.

Plucked runs from Friday August 5th to Saturday August 14 at Theatre Centre Mainspace (1115 Queen Street West). Tickets are $15 and are available here.