HER SIDE OF THE CONVERSATION
Wife of phone inventor takes spotlight
Everyone knows about Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.
But playwright Trina Davies wants to introduce you to Bell’s wife Mabel, the subject of Davies’ latest play Silence, which opens next week at the National Arts Centre.
“Mabel was a genius in her own right, and such an interesting person,” said Davies. “She was such a beautiful discovery for me. I knew very little about her.”
Born to the wealthy Hubbard family in Boston, Mabel suffered a bout of scarlet fever when she was five years old and lost her hearing. The usual response in Victorian times would have been to ship the child off to an institution. Instead, Mabel’s family hired a tutor to make sure she had the best education possible. They even sent her to Europe for finishing school, where she learned to speak and lip read in multiple languages.
Davies discovered Mabel’s influence on her husband after a suggestion by Iris Turcott, the late matriarch of Canadian theatre. In 2006, the Vancouver-based playwright got a call from Turcott, who was looking for new plays to develop for Toronto’s Canadian Stage company.
“Out of the blue, she said, ‘I want you to write a play about Alexander Graham Bell,’” Davies said. “I was really put back on my heels because Iris and I had not met in person, and I wasn’t sure where she was coming from. It really started me on a journey to dig into it.
“I always need to find my way into a story. I can’t just take an assignment and say, ‘OK, I’m going to write a play about Alexander Graham Bell.’”
Turcott left Canadian Stage a couple of years later, eliminating the possibility of a commission from that company, and Davies continued with other projects, including her acclaimed play The Romeo Initiative.
The Bell research went to the back burner until Theatre Calgary reached out to her in 2014. By then, Davies had decided she wanted to explore Mabel’s perspective.
“After many years of reading the huge amount of things written about Bell, what struck me was Mabel,” Davies said. “In her later life, she was a force of nature. She did her own experiments with food preservation, she established the Baddeck ladies society (in Nova Scotia), and she established a sewing co-operative so the local women could do crafts and earn income for their families.”
While Davies was delving into the Bells’ lives, her own life was changing in a major way. She embarked on a new romance, and found herself contemplating the “potentially epic proportions of long-term relationships.” It’s a theme reflected in the play’s love story between Mabel and Alec.
“For their time, they had a real partnership,” Davies said. “It was kind of a modern relationship in the end. They were very extraordinary people who had ordinary struggles. They had to find their way through the ups and downs of life and I think that’s what people relate to a lot.
“Part of my research was digging into some of the current psychological research that has to do with what makes a successful longtime relationship. I tried to look at the points of connection and disconnection for Mabel and Alec. And, of course, it was a learning experience for me, too.”
The play was first produced at the Grand Theatre in London, Ont., earlier this year, with former NAC English Theatre director Peter Hinton directing, and a cast that included deaf and hearing impaired performers. The same production is in Ottawa next week.
When Davies’ father saw it, he described it as an “antidote” to her previous work The Romeo Initiative, a tale about East German spies who were sent to woo and wed West German secretaries in key government departments. That play was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in 2012.
“The idea that fascinated me was the notion that love could be manufactured,” Davies said. “You could do a psychological profile of someone, determine their perfect person and then design a path to make the person fall in love. Whereas Silence is really the opposite of that. It is a true love story. It’s about people who come into things with the best of intentions and have to find their way through what life throws at them.”
During the decade or so that went into Silence, Davies said her partner Cliff was with her every step of the way. They travelled to Nova Scotia together to visit the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, and to Boston to find the house where Mabel grew up. And yes, they’re still together.
The play is dedicated to him, and Turcott, who died of cancer in 2016.