My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding: writing Canada for an American theatre audience

Abstract

After a successful season in Toronto, the Canadian musical My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (2009) was invited to travel south of the border for a production at the 2010 New York Musical Festival. Having realised prospective US-based audiences could be unfamiliar with the many Canadian elements of the narrative, playwrights David Hein and Irene Carl Sankoff embarked on an extensive process of rewriting. This article considers the (re-)presentation of and introduction to Canada the amended script offers to a non-Canadian audience. Shifting implicitly from Frye's ‘Where is here?’ question to a ‘What is "here"?’ musing, I consider the change in geographical setting, the elimination and/or alteration of topical Canadian references, and the introduction of what I term ‘reminders of Canadianness’, as I argue that the musical offers a significant opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between Canada and the US.