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Drama Canadian

On the Job

by (author) David Fennario

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Jan 1976
Category
Canadian, Unions
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889221024
    Publish Date
    Jan 1976
    List Price
    $17.95

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Description

It is Christmas Eve, 1970. In the shipping room of a Montreal dress factory, the workers get drunk and decide to go on strike.

“So many of the guys I knew on the street are gone dead or crazy, man. There’s no escape. This whole country is just one big factory, one big jail, Billy … Either you’re a good nigger or ya die. Know what I mean? … Black, yellow, white. We’re all niggers down on Rockefeller’s Plantation, man.”

“Punks, Billy. All we get now is punks … I used to have this shipping room running like a new machine, remember, Billy? … No trouble, no fuss, ’cause everybody did their job and knew their place, but now … In the last five years, the kids been getting more and more like that Gary Boyce. Shit disturbers. They all got that look in their eye. Know what I mean? Like they don’t give a damn.”

On the Job is David Fennario’s post-mortem on the ’60s and a look at the Canadian class structure. The play was first performed at Centaur Theatre, Montreal. Subsequently, it has been performed at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa; been revived by Centaur Theatre; and been staged at the Arts Club Theatre, Vancouver.

About the author

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

Awards

  • Winner, Chalmers Award for Best Canadian Play

Editorial Reviews

“Vibrates with the rough and ready energy of a street fight.”
Quill & Quire