From the renowned author of Balconville, this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working-class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec, during the First World War. Following in the trudging footsteps of Fennario’s anti-war protest play Bolsheviki (Talonbooks, 2012), Motherhouse similarly debunks the sentimental notions of duty, heroism, and nationhood that figured so prominently in Canadian war effort campaigns and that persist in Canadian history textbooks today.

In 1915, with tensions running high across the country over conscription and linguistic and religious issues, dedicated mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts assemble artillery shells to support the war effort and inadvertently find themselves assembled to bring about change both in their working conditions and in their personal lives. Meanwhile, their beloved soldiers die on battlefields overseas while their children starve at home because of war profiteering. Verdun’s munitions manufacturer employed more than four thousand women during the war, including Fennario’s mother. Tragically, the city of Verdun sacrificed more soldiers to both World Wars than any other place in Canada.

Anglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the centre of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a housepainter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy-O.” David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Duplessis’ Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed and compressed. “School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I’ve been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.”

David Fennario's profile page

“a vituperative indictment of class inequality, as expressed through a working-class Verdun woman’s experience of the war. It’s also darkly hilarious at all the wrong moments, for which I am personally eternally grateful … a very punk-rock production that takes aim at both modern and older manifestations of inequality, the use of the police state, and the perils of unfettered capitalism. I think that this play will take a lot of people by surprise (and anger a whole lot more).”
– Bloody Underrated

“Our narrator is a woman named Lillabit, although it seems Fennario’s true protagonist is the city of Verdun, itself a tragic hero of the Great War, and a site of warfare … Motherhouse challenges Canadian theatregoers’ expectations of what it is to experience a one-person show. … it is more a poetic political essay told through a theatrical character than it is a theatrical exploration of character involving political themes. … Fennario is working against the practices in theatre-making that serve to depoliticize creative output. He tasks us to tell real stories that can facilitate change: ‘No more pretending to be someone else on or offstage.’ … Just as Lillabit’s anti-war storytelling interrupts the militaristic, romanticized, red poppy-filled narrative of World War I that permeates Canadiana, Fennario’s script is an attempt to interrupt dominant practices of theatre-making.”
– Montreal Review of Books

“a powerful work, rendered magnificently​​ … the play’s real subject is the choice we all face: to fight or uphold injustice.”
– Amir Khadir [translated]