Toronto, Mississippi

By Joan MacLeod

Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four of the characters into action.

King is an Elvis impersonator, getting sick and tired of doing the same old song and dance. Jhana is mentally handicapped and working at her first “job” in a workshop for disabled people where she puts four screws in a bag and then another four screws in another bag and so on. In her mind she is on stage at Maple Leaf Gardens singing and strutting her stuff, just like her father does. Maddie is trying to keep it together while working full time as a teacher and as a mother, too busy to admit to her own loneliness. Bill is harbouring all sorts of feelings for Maddie that he is afraid to act on.

While this is a play about the power of family and love, it is finally a play about self-destruction and creation. At its heart is Jhana, whose character begs the question whether the other characters, in their own ways, are any less handicapped. She’s good company—funny, driven, passionate and yearning for the same things those around her yearn for—if they can get over their preconceptions about the mentally handicapped and give her the space to achieve her dreams.

The play came out of the author’s decade-long involvement working with mentally handicapped adults and children as a life skills instructor. Re-released in a revised and updated edition, it is Joan MacLeod’s first full-length play, receiving more than twenty international productions over the past two decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781772010565

Joan MacLeod

Multiple Betty Mitchell, Chalmer’s, Dora ,and Governor General’s Award-winning author Joan MacLeod grew up in North Vancouver and studied Creative Writing at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. Now an internationally celebrated star of the world of the theatre, MacLeod developed her finely honed playwriting skills during seven seasons as playwright-in-residence at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. She turned her hand to opera with her libretto for The Secret Garden, which won a Dora Award. She has had many radio dramas produced by CBC Stereo Theatre, including Hand of God, a one-hour drama adapted from her play Jewel. She has also written numerous scripts for film and television productions. Translated into eight languages, her work has been extensively produced around the world. Multiple simultaneous productions of her hit play Shape of a Girl toured internationally for four years, including a sold-out run in New York. Her play Amigo’s Blue Guitar won the 1991 Governor General’s Drama Award. Her Governor General’s Award nominations include one in 1996 for The Hope Slide / Little Sister and one in 2009 for Another Home Invasion. Talon has also published her 2000, Gracie, The Valley, Toronto, Mississippi, and Homechild. MacLeod also writes prose and poetry, which has been published in a wide variety of literary journals. She also teaches Creative Writing at the University of Victoria.

Book preview

Title Page

Toronto, Mississippi premiered at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto on October 6, 1987, with the following cast:

JHANA: Brooke Johnson

BILL: Jim Warren

MADDIE: Marlane O’Brien

KING: Bruce McFee

Directed by Andy McKim

Set and Costume design by Sue LePage

Lighting Design by Louise Guinand

Characters

KING, forty, Elvis impersonator, Jhana’s father

JHANA, eighteen, moderately mentally handicapped, hyperactive with symptoms of autism, employed at a sheltered workshop

BILL, thirty, poet, part-time college instructor, boarding with Jhana and Maddie

MADDIE, forty, high school English teacher, Jhana’s mother

Setting

A middle-class living room in Toronto.

Author’s Note

In Jhana’s first scene she is slightly rocking back and forth. It is something she does to comfort herself, and a signal to Bill that she’s phasing out a little. This is what Maddie refers to later as stimming out and considers inappropriate.

Later in this scene Jhana (pronounced Jah–nah) says, We’ll all be at workshop. We’ll all be at drop-in. The social circle mentally handicapped people move in is often quite small. The same people Jhana went to school with she now works with, bowls with, and goes to drop-in with. Drop-in is a Friday night event for handicapped people at the local community centre.

Jhana later says, I am mentally handicapped. This is something she does not like having to say. In this case she becomes angry with her mother for making her say it and she yells, Close the patio door! Jhana is imitating something her mother said earlier but it’s the emotion behind the phrase she’s imitating rather than the meaning – something she does often.

Jhana whines off-stage about finding her clothes, vacuuming, etc. She is being very lazy about the way she speaks – partly because she finds the tasks at hand uninteresting but also because her mother understands her even when she’s talking silly. If you had to say all your sentences backwards for the next half hour it would be very difficult and concentrated work; in a way this is what Jhana has to do all the time. The way she talks naturally is very jumbled but when she is interested in communicating well she can do it; at the very end of the play when she dials 911 she speaks in perfect sentences.

Jhana is obsessed about her father visiting because she loves him and hasn’t seen him for a while. But carrying one thought at a time rather than a half dozen at once is also part of her mental handicap and comes up often. Jhana also often repeats the last line of what her father is saying; she does this to show she is interested but doesn’t have a clue what is being talked about. She’ll repeat, she’ll agree, she’ll imitate the emotion she picks up from that person. Her father often talks over her head because he doesn’t live with her.

When Jhana says Betty died, she refers to the fact that some of the people she went to school with and worked with also have physical handicaps and sometimes a shorter life span. Jhana doesn’t have this problem but she is much more accustomed to death than the average eighteen-year-old.

The best way to approach Jhana is to find the Jhana within – she’s just like any eighteen-year-old but not as slick, and once that discovery’s happened there are some mentally handicapped traits that can be added. There is sometimes a flatness to a mentally handicapped person’s speech or inappropriate emphasis because what’s being said isn’t always understood – statements become questions and vice versa. Physically there’s stimming out and inappropriate physical behaviour. Mentally handicapped people also often have high anxiety rates and low self-esteem; think of a job interview you don’t feel qualified for but you fake your way through.

Jhana is hyper-active, her energy is nearly always unrelenting. She is mentally handicapped with only some symptoms of autism – so don’t think of Jhana as autistic.

Jhana is based partly on a friend of mine who is a very lovely woman who is also mentally handicapped. The most important think I can tell you about playing Jhana is that a mental handicap or any handicap is a sad thing but this life, this particular person, is also a joy.

PROLOGUE

Black on set, spot on KING at microphone, costumed like early Elvis, with a Memphis accent.

KING:

Mrs. Priscilla Presley has just left the building and believe you me folks, that is something we can all be grateful for. So now we