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David FennarioAnglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the centre of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a housepainter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy-O.” David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Duplessis’ Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed and compressed. “School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I’ve been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.”
“Tying Bolsheviki all together is Fennario’s determined
de-glorification of war and old-soldier nostalgia. He’s still an
unrepentant, hard-charging leftie. A socialist, pro-worker,
anti-war activist who, though now confined to a wheelchair, has
lost none of his dramatic edge, as pissed off ... as when he wrote
On the Job forty years ago.”
— Montreal Mirror
“Part invective against militarism, part anti-imperialist rant,
part foul-mouthed diatribe against some cherished values, the piece
must be an actor’s dream, affording a performer the opportunity to
mimic a variety of voices, to sing, to joke, to bluster, and to
chew the scenery with aplomb. … Bolsheviki is trenchant and loud;
it makes unsubtle points about war, but it deserves a staging, if
only to see Canadian audiences bristle at its more uncomfortable
shock moments.”
– Canadian Literature
“Bolsheviki is vintage Fennario, gritty, authentic, touching,
replete with one- liners, never boring ... making its
radical-pacifist point while paying due respect to veterans.”
— Montreal Gazette
“While Canadian theatre has certainly portrayed the nation at war
before, Bolsheviki’s perspective on the First World War, especially
its often mutinous, revolutionary final days, is unique, even among
the history books.” — Robyn Fadden, hour.ca
“Unlike what is usually considered pacifist propaganda, Fennario’s
heartbreaking drama is … [an] unsentimental but at the same time
sweetly poetic rendering of life in the trenches during World War I
… a precise and powerful statement against all those in command who
have privileged a distorted picture in ‘history books’ of the real
conditions under which the men lived and died.”
– Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato, PhD (Tuscia University, Viterbo,
Italy)
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