Language decoder

When she started working on the script that became Holland nearly a decade ago, Trish Cooper’s pen was guided by a simmering rage against the bureaucratic machine.

As the mom of a sledge-hockey star with spina bifida, Cooper had grown accustomed to navigating a never-ending series of hurdles to ensure her son’s access to what she calls “secret resources” that only seemed to reveal themselves when hidden passcodes were spoken, phone calls were made and intricate dances were performed.

After one particularly circuitous stretch of meetings with a social worker to discuss respite and child care, so immense was their frustration that Cooper and her husband, filmmaker Sam Vint, could have punched through walls. Cooper suggested that Vint make a documentary about the hoops that families of children with disabilities have to leap through.

“And he was like, ‘Or you should write a play,’” she says.

That’s exactly what Cooper did, taking her first swing as part of the Prairie Theatre Exchange’s playwriting unit during the tenure of artistic director Robert Metcalfe.

“But then it was like, what a horrible, boring, miserable play about a bunch of people in offices being mad at bureaucrats,” says Cooper, who decided to up the ante by allowing her characters to snap, where in real life she was determined not to bend.

While the playwright’s response was to grab her notepad, Carrie (Jessy Ardern), the matriarch of Holland, which opens tonight at Tom Hendry Warehouse, instead grabs the social worker (Jennifer Lyon) and refuses to let go, triggering a brawling comedy about parenthood, caregiving, the right to space and the fight for control in a chaotic world.

Along with Ardern and Lyon, the cast includes Daniel Bogart as Carrie’s supportive partner Paul, and Outside Joke improv teammates Toby Hughes and Jane Testar in four roles apiece.

The themes explored in Holland — a co-production of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Theatre Projects Manitoba — expand on ones Cooper examined in her first two professionally produced plays, 2016’s Social Studies and 2024’s The Comeback, the latter of which was co-written with Vint.

In Social Studies, a 30-something woman returns, tail between her legs, to live in her childhood bedroom only to discover that her activist mom has given the room over to a Sudanese refugee. In The Comeback, inspired by Vint’s reclamation of his Métis heritage, a family learns to go forward by learning more about its past; the play will be produced next season at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, it was announced this week.

As in those plays, in Holland, Cooper uses a good-hearted nuclear family as a filter to explore serious and often systemic issues with a collective dramaturgical approach, working with a team of advisers either living with disabilities or those who have supported family members living with disabilities to ensure that the production proceeds in a sensitive, faithful manner.

Debbie Patterson of Sick + Twisted Theatre served as the show’s production and accessibility dramaturg; Tyler Sneesby is the apprentice sound designer, working alongside lead designer and composer Daniel Roy; and Samantha Machado is apprentice director to Suzie Martin, who is directing the annual TPM-RMTC co-production (after David Yee’s Among Men and Armin Wiebe’s The Recipe) for a third consecutive year.

In the leadup to opening night, the cast visited Winnipeg’s Rehab Centre for Children for a staged reading of Holland’s first act.

“Holland begins as a play about one woman taking a drastic action out of desperation, but it becomes a play about community support and the proverbial village standing up together in the face of broken systems and seemingly insurmountable obstacles,” writes Martin, TPM’s artistic director, in the play’s enrichment guide.

That collective aspect was also inspired by fellow parents and caregivers with whom Cooper interacted in Facebook support groups, serving as a constant reminder throughout the writing process that even stories that feel the most personal and private are actually shared.

“All these parents that I’ve talked to who have children with disabilities, they’ve all been through this stuff,” says Cooper. “It’s a language that we all speak.”

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