Women's tragic, hilarious stories stitch together musical P.E.I. play

Veteran P.E.I. actor Marlane O'Brien had never written for the stage before but her musical play Stories from the Red Dirt Road came together somewhat like the patchwork quilt at its centre — with a lot of hard work, determination and imperfect moments.

Five years ago, then-artistic director of the Confederation Centre of the Arts Wade Lynch gave her the book And My Name Is…Stories From The Quilt by Island author Margie Carmichael and suggested she adapt it. 

"He just gave it to me — 'Fill your boots,'" O'Brien recalls Lynch saying. 

Soon after that O'Brien met Carmichael by chance at the local flea market — she took at as another sign the play was meant to be.

Real people live here and these are stories about real people surviving really difficult things and triumphing.— Marlane O'Brien

After scraping together money over the years to hold many workshops, O'Brien said she began to see how she could take the characters and stories and put them on the stage. It was a final "bang up" workshop in February that brought it all together, she said. 

"It was like massively, creatively, wrenchingly amazing," she told CBC Radio Mainstreet's Angela Walker Tuesday.

Women heart of story

"It's got to do with the women at the heart of each of the stories," O'Brien said of why the story worked well for stage..

"There's six or seven stories in there and all of them are based on women that Margie met or knew." 

A woman's story about a residential school experience was told to the book's author by a Mi'kmaw elder and O'Brien said actress Andrea Menard has brought the character to life on stage. 

"Her knowledge and her sensitivities helped finish off that story," O'Brien said.  

O'Brien said the other stories are of women like Flora Hill, an amateur mortician, another woman who has a baby out of wedlock and a senior who helps a young boarder recover from an abusive childhood. 

"Real people live here and these are stories about real people surviving really difficult things and triumphing," O'Brien said.

Quilt blocks bring it together

O'Brien she used music — some of it also written by Carmichael — poems and a central character of woman wanting to fix a quilt to help link the individual stories.

"She has patchy spots on a quilt she made with her grandmother and she wants to pass on to her niece. So she's trying to find some special quilt blocks to put over them and in the course of looking for the perfect ones, she comes across these stories and these quilts in the community that she lives in." 

The show plays Wednesday to Friday at the Mack Theatre until Sept. 21. Show time is 7:30 p.m.

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