Review: My Pregnant Brother (Zoofest)

The Celebrated Solo...

and her brother...and a phone...

by Rebecca Ugolini

Johanna Nutter’s celebrated solo piece My Pregnant Brother has its roots in the familiar. Standing barefoot before the audience and wielding a piece of chalk, Nutter recounts her nomadic and free-spirited childhood as she traces street names onto the black floor of La Chapelle’s performance space: Boulevard St. Laurent, Avenue Mont-Royal, Avenue du Parc. From those well-worn Montreal streets, My Pregnant Brother sets off to explore territory that is, if not uncharted, then still mostly unknown and misunderstood: transsexual identity, body politics and the dynamics of an unconventional family.

At first glance, My Pregnant Brother is a piece about the difficulty of people who identify as transsexual to find acceptance in their families and to traverse the world of hospital appointments, gender-specific pronouns, and society’s conventions with a sense of normalcy and dignity. As a piece which portrays those struggles with sensitivity and humour, but doesn’t pull any punches, My Pregnant Brother is a triumph.

Ford's Focus: Johanna Nutter

Dreams Do Come True for Johanna Nutter

by Barbara Ford

A couple of days after our interview, I got an e-mail from Montreal actor/playwright, Johanna Nutter, sharing an obscure fact that the word career has the same root as the word careen. Our meeting at a local café-Laundromat in her beloved Plateau had been lengthy, winding our way through one of the most singular childhoods I’ve heard of to her present day coup: My Pregnant Brother on stage in French at Montreal’s La Licorne. How could she have known, lying there on her kitchen floor one fateful night a few short years ago, that a life which had careened and bumped its way to that dark moment would eventually deliver her to such a miraculous destination?

“My father was a beatnik and my mum was a hippie.  I came along ‘unexpectedly’ before most of their friends started having kids so I grew up surrounded by adults, who thought the best way to raise children was to treat them as equals.”  There were obvious pros and cons to the approach: she felt valued as a person with equal rights but had to parent herself much of the time. It did, however, breed strong survival skills at an early age which have come in handy as you shall see.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part XV)

Eighteen

I’m home. I entered Vegas like a lion and left in a hurry. It was a fittingly operatic and action-packed lightshow of massive physical and emotional not-in-kansas-anymore moments, and it certainly wasn’t Zion. Or was it… (INSIDE VOICE: Wow: am I writing a musical?)

I dunno. 

You know what they say…

(Blackout)

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part XIV)

Seventeen

Zion National Park is the greatest place in the world. I don’t know what else to say, really. I just spent three of the most wonderful days here, rediscovering this glorious ball of water and earth on which I breathe and move and feel and eat and drink and sleep. From the first glimpse of the morning light on the sandstone, with the iPod shuffling miraculously into Lauren Hill’s Everything is Everything, I knew why I had to come to Zion. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part XIII)

Sixteen

Cows are from outer space. No really, they are. Look:

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part XII)

Fifteen

So, saying goodbye to Yesca wasn’t easy. I hope to be back for the wedding. The crazy green dress from my play inspired Spirit to suggest that be our bridesmaids theme: sequins. Because of course, the sartorial rule for bridesmaids’ dresses is that you can never find an occasion to wear them again. Leaving Taos marked the real beginning of my vacation; just me and the open road for a whole five days. I headed north, waving goodbye to the earthships along the way. I’d been surprised by them on the way in; a whole community of these creations out there in the desert, reminding me of that Co Hoedeman short animated film I loved so much as a child: The Sand Castle.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part XI)

Fourteen

The last time I saw Yesca  was eighteen years ago. She was living in West Hollywood and we jumped into her pool with all our clothes on and then took her Great Dane, Saucy, to The Burger That Ate L.A., dripping wet and giggling like mad. So, it was only fitting that when she met me at Embudo Station, where she’s been ever since, we should jump into the Rio Grande with all our clothes on. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part X)

Thirteen

Vegas looks great in the rear-view mirror. That’s about all I saw of it. Well, can you blame me? 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part IX)

Twelve

I think if my grin gets any wider it’s going to cleave my head in two and the top half will fall off. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part VIII)

Ten

Time distills. It takes the gritty real and makes memories out of it; strings of pearls, some cloudier than others. And photographs don’t always present the meat of the matter. This is what I’m thinking as I begin this account of the last days of the run. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part VII)

Nine

“How goes darling?”

These three words posted on my Facebook page by my friend Lucinda Davis just made me burst into tears. And I can hear her now, asking; “But WHY?!!” Because the fact that someone would take time out of her busy schedule, make room in her on or off-line social life to inquire after my well-being touched me. There must be something seriously wrong with me if I cry when people are nice to me.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part VI)

Eight

Trees. 

Trees have always been a very important part of my life. See, I was raised by the Lorax.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part V)

Seven

“I’m on the edge of glory”.

Mum was singing this to herself while making coffee the morning after seeing my play. I asked her who sang the song, and she told me: Lady Gaga. She thinks it could be my theme song right now.

Surprised and delighted, once again. Actually, that about sums it up. Opening night was surprising, and delightful, and magical. It was also full of dragons, but magic tends to be that way. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part IV)

Six

I was hazed by a crow on the way to the theatre. All the way there, it kept diving at me; swooping within an inch of my head. I finally stopped and asked the bird; how did you know? Yeah: it’s opening night. I had to go to the theatre earlier because I had “somehow” forgotten to put aside two tickets for my mum and my brother. Who are both coming tonight.  Back in Montreal, Jeremy and I had a discussion about this, and we agreed that they could come on any night BUT opening. We figured I should crack the ice at the Cultch before I had to skate over such fragile territory. But once I got here, I just decided that they have both waited long enough. So… here we go.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part III)

Five

Remember how I said my family was dependably unpredictable? If I had been asked to predict how things were going to go with my Mum, I probably would have described her as being slightly frazzled, certainly grumpy about the growing hordes of motorists on the Island, and, due to the new wrinkle of my writing about her, probably prickly and stand-offish. She was none of those things. In fact, the person who met me at the Long Harbour Ferry was a beaming little wood nymph.

We took the Salt Spring Island bus to her place. There was a time when I would come to Salt Spring, not knowing if she would meet me at the ferry, or even where she was: she’s been on the island for almost 25 years, but she didn’t always have a phone, or even a home. If she had a car, it was always a bit of a surprise if she could get it running. Hitch-hiking is de rigueur on the island, but I get nervous any time I feel I may be imposing on anyone in any way, and those rides were white-knuckled affairs for me. Now, there’s a bus. And Mum even brought the necessary toonie for my fare. There was a toddler in the front seat riding the bus for the first time, and clearly not enjoying it. Mum got all us passengers singing, “the wheels on the bus go round and round” and he settled right in.

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother (Part II)

Four

July 18th, Pender to Salt Spring Ferry

Everything has a story. Remember Architect David of the Penthouse Sweet? Well, he just told me the last one I heard on Pender. I took a photo of this sculpture (above)—one of countless beautiful things in the home that he designed for he and Professor John on the island. The artist, Cathy, was married to a bad man. He drank and when he did, he got violent. He would go out to the barn and beat the horses. Well, one night, the horses had had enough: they trampled him to death. And that changed Cathy’s life. This sculpture is a self-portrait… There’s Cathy, in the middle, surrounded by the horses who saved her.

I love Islanders. Arguably, I am one. Yes, Montrealers, we’re Islanders, too. These 48 hours on Pender have been so full of beautiful stories told by beautiful Islanders I don’t know where to begin. Barb and Keith. That’s where. Barb and I were roommates in St. Henri—above the AA restaurant on Notre Dame—way back in the day. Montreal was full to busting with musicians then: Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra, Three O’Clock Train, The Nils, Bootsauce, Me, Mom & Morgentaler… Montreal’s first wave of awesome bands was in full swing. And Barb swung the best parties. We had a long wooden veranda and it was always full of flowers, people, and wine. 

Blog: Johanna Nutter and the Journey of My Pregnant Brother

(The Charlebois Post is enormously proud to be presenting Johanna Nutter's blog about the journey of her celebrated solo, My Pregnant Brother, to Vancouver where it will be seen for the first time by people the piece describes. We think you'll be as delighted as we were by these first three installments and impatient for what will follow.)


One

I think there’s a point where fear gets so intense that it sort of blows itself up. Once this happens, all that’s left to do is step boldly from one moment to the next. I’m there right now. I just checked the bag containing my little white rocking chair and am now tangoing my way to British Columbia for the west coast première of My Pregnant Brother. 

For those of you who haven’t seen the show, it’s a solo piece in which I relive the experiences surrounding the birth of my niece. My brother (née my sister, transgender for over a decade, still in possession of reproductive parts) got pregnant and needed me at a time when I was trying to change my own identity by shrugging off the overblown sense of responsibility my childhood had helped to contrive. Of course, hilarity ensues…

The show’s doing well. It’s won some awards, toured a bit. In November, the French incarnation (translated by yours truly) will open at La Licorne, granting a longtime wish of mine to act en français. But the most beautifullest part of that is that they have asked me to also present the show in its original English language on Friday nights. This will be a fledgling attempt to bridge the two theatrical solitudes and I want to help it fly. Hence this blog: for the next week or so, I will be posting regular updates on the whole West Coast Experience.

What makes this experience blog-worthy is the fact that the two main characters in the play (outside of yours truly); my mother and brother, will be introduced to it for the first time. Up to now, all they have had to go on are the reviews, which have often resorted to over-simplifications, no doubt in the interest of keeping the word count within a prescribed ballpark. Calling my mother a “spaced-out hippie” gives the reader an easy image, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the kaleidoscope of states she is capable of. But that’s what us writers have to do sometimes; generalize to save time and space—the great thing about blogging is; we can go on and on and if you run out of time, you can just stop reading. 