A sort of homecoming
Playwright Dylan Coburn Gray set out to write about the theme of ‘home’. But then he found himself working with children who didn’t have one. Inspired by the stories of the youngest victims of Ireland’s housing crisis, his new show, which forms part of th
Asap lay wright, I wrote my first play as a member of Dublin Youth Theatre. My mother Veronica is a director because she was a member of the same theatre group.
So when we were asked to collaborate on a new show for DYT’s 40th year, it felt very fitting.
And the fact that the theme was ‘home’ only helped.
When we were beginning work on This Is A Room, which is currently part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, a year ago, DYT was approached by a social worker with Focus Ireland.
She was working with young people who were living in emergency accommodation near DYT headquarters in the city centre and she hoped we might be able to offer them drama workshops, tailored to them, as their situation severely limited the scope for them to do such things alongside their peers.
The distinction between making theatre ‘about’ a group versus making work ‘with’ a group is an important one. Making ‘about’, put bluntly, is mostly about offering the audience something interesting. Making ‘with’, in contrast, is about offering the participants something meaningful.
It’s a big word, ‘meaning’, but it cuts to the core of what the arts are for. They encourage us to reflect on the world and how we move through it. To consider the choices available to us, within the larger situation we had no say in entering, and to make those that make us the versions of ourselves we most want to be.
We were making a show about home anyway, but the chance to make as how where members of DYT would work alongside young service users — who have a much more acute need to reflect on the idea — was a very exciting prospect. And that, in turn, was why it was such a pity that process ultimately wasn’t possible.
The young people we met had chaotic lives. Their ability to commit to being in the same place two nights a week was minimal, no matter how enthusiastic they were to take part in the project.
A pity. For us, and — I think — for them. Certain things have to go on hold when you exist in survival mode, yes, but it doesn’t follow that those things are unnecessary. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a loss. It is, however, a loss that goes unnoticed because it’s a less obvious symptom of chronic suffering.
The simplistic understanding of trauma is that a very bad thing happened, and you felt very bad while it was happening. When you stop feeling bad — even if takes a long time — you are no longer traumatised.
Said that baldly, it sounds as silly as it is, but Ireland’s response to the housing crisis betrays an understanding not noticeably more subtle.
If we woke up tomorrow and no families were living in hotels — a solution that has been repeatedly promised but not delivered — the housing crisis would not be over.
Even if the underlying factors that lead to families ending up living in hotels were addressed, the housing crisis would still not be over.
It will only begin to be over when the young people who are currently homeless have caught up with their peers, in not just experience but the capacity to exist robustly in the world that experience affords them.
This is because trauma isn’t just a bad feeling. It is a bad feeling that eats away at your ability to feel other feelings. It entrains itself. It ramifies. Having said that, I want to stress that to be traumatised isn’t to be doomed. Experience, good or bad, shapes us, but it doesn’t define our destiny.
Homelessness is a stasis. It is a cessation of growth. As an adult, it can mean a two-year hole in a CV that continues to cost you work even after you are no longer homeless.
Homelessness as a young person can mean not learning how to feed yourself, how to get a job or apartment, not doing the exams you can’t go to college without, not playing an instrument or knowing what celebrity the internet’s currently mad for under eight layers of irony.
Falling into the hole hurts, but so does climbing out.
Some of those things might seem trivial to you, as someone who knows about those things and thinks of them as luxuries. Non-essential. Nice but not that important.
And you’re not entirely wrong, there is a hierarchy, but you probably wouldn’t want to live in a world where an appreciable fraction of all small talk made you feel small, ignorant, alienated.
That thought leads into the larger theme of the play we’ve made with the members of Dublin Youth Theatre. Growing up is a process of learning, and you learn a lot from your home or lack thereof.
It establishes a baseline you will spend the rest of your life. Our cast stand on the stage and tell you about the rooms they’ve lived their life in. Some of them have tables with tablecloths. Some of them have sleeping bags but not beds. It’s fiction, but everything they say is true about someone, somewhere. The audience can’t help but consider how their current situation is going to inform what happens next for them.
It’s a play about young people, at moments in time, thinking about their futures. How and what they hope for tells you a lot about them. It tells you a lot about the world they live in. It’s the world we live in too, but they’ll be living in it when we’re dead.
In that combination of facts, there’s a lot to think about. That’s how you know it’s a good topic for a play.