The 1940s in Newfoundland offered little to a woman. Life in a fishing outport meant unrelenting poverty and an exhausting cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing. Too many mothers died, and their children were turned over to the Sisters to raise in St. John’s. Mothers without husbands entered sudden and desperate relationships with men or fell into prostitution.
Some women became nuns to escape that motherhood with all its perils. They wanted a chance for peace and predictability. Those young women discovered life in a cloister meant a different foot was on the back of your neck. All these lives intersected at the doors of Belvedere Orphanage.
The sudden death of Kitty’s mother sends Kitty and her younger sisters, Hannah and Ruth, to an orphanage in St. John’s. Her brother is allowed to stay home because “boys earn and girls cost.” The next seven years are a test of endurance as she copes with brutality from a cruel, self-righteous nun and the bullies who curry the Sister’s favour. Kitty tries to protect her younger sisters in this unpredictable environment. She finds a trusted friend in the bold and fun-loving Josephine, who is in and out of the institution as often as her mother is in and out of relationships.
Kitty’s infrequent ally, Sister Theresa, struggles to maintain her integrity in a system that thrives on its long-standing power over the community that it is supposed to serve. She too seeks a path out from under Sister Mary, but Sister is reluctant to give up her favourite novice.

Michelle T. Clemens is a writer, producer, director, and actor born in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. She won two Arts and Letters Awards: Showdown won the 2023 Dramatic Script and Ready, Aim won in 2022 for Poetry. Showdown also had a dramatic reading at Persistence Theatre’s Year of the Arts Women’s play festival in 2024, and it was part of the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s International Craft Bites Program. Michelle’s three-act plays Mummering, Mischief and Murder: A Tibbs Eve Farce sold out in December 2023, and Boomerang debuted at the Barbara Barrett Theatre to near-capacity houses.

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