Mary Walsh: Come Home Year 1966 – A Staged Reading of an Original Play

Perchance Theatre welcomes Mary Walsh as a part of our Open Sky Series on Wednesday August 24th at 7:00pm. Part coming of age story, part murder mystery, it’s about a young girl’s hard fall from innocence to experience, and her all-consuming quest to be a somebody in the eyes of her estranged family. It’s the summer of 1966 and Newfoundland is celebrating its first ever Come Home Year inviting the Newfoundland diaspora to come back to their ancestral beginnings, and from all over the world Newfoundlanders are coming home, and so is our heroine, Marietta. For reasons forever unknown to her, she had been sent to live with her two maiden aunts and an invalid uncle when she was just eight months old, separating her from her seven brothers and sisters and her mother and father for most of her life. But suddenly at age 13, as the result of a serious infraction, Marietta has been sent from the home she’s always known, back to live with her parents and family, the people who’d never wanted her in the first place.

​All through that sad, sun-drenched summer of 1966, Marietta tries desperately to fit in, to belong somewhere, to be somebody, but the harder she tries the more she feels left out. She is almost invisible in a house alive with 25 people – a house bursting at the seams with pregnant sisters, Brooklyn cousins, New Jersey friends, Bay dollies, and gorgeous American fellas let loose on the world in red Impala convertibles, all determined to have the most fun summer of their lives celebrating Come Home Year – Marietta struggles to write herself into the narrative.