An UnDutiful Daughter: Readings from Wendy Judith Cutler, Playwright, and Cast

“An UnDutiful Daughter, which premiered in July 2022 at Beaver Point Hall for a 4-day successful run, portrays conflicts within an upper middle-class Jewish family as the daughter comes into political and sexual awakening as a lesbian feminist during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. The play combines pathos, humour (there was much laughter), pain, tenderness and longing (and also many tears) with the magical ingredients of theatre, where anything can happen and nothing is impossible. This beautiful collaboration between a stellar cast of actors and friends and production principles and a bevy of supportive theatre-makers and community folks has manifested beyond my wildest dreams. Our theatre cast and crew has made tangible and significant contributions to our Salt Spring Island’s diverse communities. Transforming my memoir into a play has been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life! Largely drawn from my journals and family correspondence I collected during my 20s and 30s, I meld together the utter truth with some fictional elements.The characters in the play are: Daughter, Mother, Father, Brother, Lover, Ex-Lover, Mother’s Friend and Karma, who is a bit of a shape-shifter, medium and channel. I recreated scenes in my childhood bedroom, my father’s hospital room, my brother’s courtroom, my mother’s kitchen and my lover’s and my dining room. This is both a very personal, political and, ultimately, universal story of bittersweet resilience. It interrogates the themes of political consciousness and transformation, family estrangement, homophobia and hetero-normativity and the potential for reconciliation that extends through time and also after death.”