Local playwright focuses on early days of motherhood
Dramatist delves into issues of isolation, postpartum depression in The Waves
Exploring the isolation felt by many women during the early days of motherhood came naturally to playwright Laura Quigley and formed the basis for her recently published play, The Waves.
Quigley drew on her own experiences as a mother of two, who suffered postpartum depression following her second child's birth.
“I was feeling really quite isolated,” Quigley said. “We were far away from my closest friends, pretty far away from family.
“And I didn't realize, in having my babies, how kind of isolated I would feel.”
Quigley, who was working on her Masters at the University of Guelph, started to explore the idea of isolation.
“Going to do my Masters was a part of like, maybe I need to reclaim a little bit of myself,” she said. “Maybe I need to do something for me to help me kind of get out of this funk.”
The first draft of the play became part of her Masters thesis as she wrote about the process of writing The Waves.
Quigley continued to develop the piece along with her professor, playwright Judith Thompson, exploring labour and birth as well.
And as she was writing, she decided to interview her mother and grandmother, to get a multi-generational perspective.
“I was really quite blown away at how things have really not shifted all that much in terms of women and their ability … to feel like they can take ownership of the birth process,” she said.
Quigley, now an instructor at both the University of Windsor and Wayne State University, also found many women experienced the same feelings of isolation during the very early years of motherhood, as their babies grew into toddlers.
She produced a performance of the play at a festival called Summer Works, in Toronto, in 2018 and last year received a grant that allowed her to do a final draft for publication.
The Waves was just published in The Canadian Theatre Review, a quarterly magazine reporting critical analysis and coverage of current theatre developments.
Quigley is hopeful someone will now pick it up and produce it.
The play dives into under-represented territory, the loss of identity in motherhood, postpartum depression and the rebuilding of self after giving birth.
“Women want to talk. Women want to share their birth stories and I think that the play itself provides a real opening that we don't always feel is there,” Quigley said.
Her next project is a play based on her family relations and history, some of which she only recently found out, including connections to Indigenous people and her lineage.
“There's so much about my history that I didn't know. And I think it's a shared Canadian reality.
“We all have ancestry that we don't really know or understand. We just haven't handed down our stories about where we come from and how we set up.”
She is heading out to the East Coast in May to do research after receiving a grant for the new project.