I want a write my great grandfather’s life, for the stage: Daniel Maloney, an ordinary man, ordinary hero, but extraordinary at the same time. How everyone’s life with worth telling and exploring. A mythic retelling, across two continents— love, family, freedom, identity, hard work, determination, pride and passion and balancing all this…everyone has a life worth telling and exploring. There are still stories to be told.
Bred in Your Bones is about a man’s life, how only the sum of the parts makes up the whole. A tale repeated in a million variations— an immigrant brings himself and his family to Canada.
As part of this mythic retelling the play is non-linear and jumps to different points in Daniel’s life, as he recalls it from old age. Playing with the idea of how a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, a voice, a word, a recalling, a story can bring something to the forefront; even from the very back of one’s mind, something one thinks is forgotten. And how ‘there are really only five people in the world’ and everyone is interconnected.
Playing with different forms of memory…different takes on one incident…how even chance encounters can affect and/or change someone forever.
Since this is a man’s life it ends as all lives end.
“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”
-Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones
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