Spotlight On...
Florence Gibson
 Florence Gibson's first play, Belle,
was a beautiful, harrowing look at how black women were left behind during early
sufferage movements. It earned her rave reviews, and, maybe more importantly, full
houses during both its first run in 2000, and the remount in 2001.
Her newest offering, which closes Factory Theatre's season, is the brave
new work
Home is My Road, a play about international adoption in Romania.
It may seem an odd choice for a playwright who so beautifully captured the voices
of the mid 1800s, but, as Gibson told us recently when she sat down for an interview,
the themes have stayed the same. Belle, in her words, left her with unfinished
business.
Rachel Bokhout: Tell me about the story.
Florence Gibson: The promo line is that what I wanted to do was look at
race annihilation through international adoption of the Roma. That's really what
the piece is about.
It came from my finding different sources that said the vast majority of the kids
in those orphanages in Romania, in the early 90s, when they were opened up -- weren't
Romanian kids. They were Gypsy children, living in Romania. There's a large population
of Gypsies there.
A lot of the kids in these orphanages are so sick -- many have AIDS and Hepatitis.
And since the kids were sick, what happened in Romania [because of the interest in
international adoption] is that a lot of people started going to the countryside,
to the poor and impoverished -- to the people that had almost nothing, and buying
the kids there.
A lot of the parents, particularly the mothers, were coerced into it, by husbands,
brothers, other people who thought "well, you can part with one and get us some
money."
I really wanted to look at the whole process of how you get a mother to give up
a child. At what level is this every really ethical, from a woman's perspective?
How do you keep a minority culture down, through women? You take away their children;
you break the structure of family. Mother and child -- it's the most fundamental
unit there is, and it's destroyed through international adoption of we're not really
careful about who these kids are.
RB: Is that what you would say the continuation from Belle is? Discussing
racism and the mother/child unit?
FG: It is, kind of. I realized that as I got into it. I didn't know what
this play was going to be. I knew it was going to be about the Roma, and as I went
into it the thing that caught my eye was "oh my gosh, these children are Gypsy
children; they're not Romanian children."
And the farther I got into it, I realized we're still talking about flesh trades
here; we're still talking about slavery; we're still talking about putting a price
on a child. The healthier it is, the whiter it is, the younger it is -- the more
value it's got. How do we take it from the mother, how do we put that price on it?
Who says that the woman with the most dollars gets to be a mother? Where is this
all coming from?
 It
really is Belle's issues in a contemporary setting. It was unfinished business for
me.
By the same token, I really wanted to look in this play at the whole thing of
motherhood. There's a woman from Canada who goes to adopt a child in Romania, and
aren't her instincts as powerful and as necessary and as human as the woman who has
had a child? And the giving nature that she has is so huge, it's so important. It's
so essential to life. Mothering is an instinct. It's truly an instinct. And should
we be shattering that?
I also wanted to look at Western female complicity. Are we really, really [seeing]
what we're doing?
RB: I know it takes you a long time to shape a play, partially because
you do lots of rewrites, but also because you do meticulous research. What kind of
digging did you do to get the background material for this play?
FG: Initially I read Isabel Fonseca's book, Bury Me Standing. It's
a book about the contemporary situation of the Rom throughout Eastern Europe -- and
throughout the world, but mostly throughout Eastern Europe.
After that, I started reading tons more stuff, watching documentaries, and becoming
involved with the RCAC -- the Roma Community and Advocacy Centre here. There, I met
a lot of Roma activists. They were hugely helpful. I went to meetings, I went to
cultural nights -- all kinds of stuff. I've been in their homes and they've talked
to me endlessly about many, many things.
They were so helpful and just so open. One of the guys said to me that if there
are two Rom in a room, there are three opinions. Everybody's got different opinions
about what is Romany, what the culture is, what they need.
They were hugely helpful in sorting through the Diaspora that is Roma culture
throughout the world. It's a hugely disparate culture.
RB: Is the issue of international adoption prominent for Roma advocacy
groups?
FG: Not so much, because it was happening for only a short period of time
in Romania. It was important for me because I realized this was another way to keep
down Roma culture.
And what they did of course, after about 15 months, is that they closed the doors
completely. They didn't allow any more international adoption through Romania. But
my understanding is that the numbers in the orphanages have actually doubled since
then. There's something like 200,000 kids, and they really don't know what to do.
Again, large, large numbers are Roma children.
The level of poverty of the Rom in Eastern Europe... They live at a very base
level. They have absolutely nothing -- no education, no housing, no running water
-- absolutely nothing. And there are large, large communities. The illiteracy rate
is something like 75%, great crime rates as well because they're reduced to stealing,
drug problems, all kind of things. So international adoption often becomes a choice.
Of course. And wanting to look at the crux of that choice is why I wrote the play.
RB: And now you're a couple weeks away. How's rehearsal going?
FG: Really well. We've started weaving in the music and the dance that
is such an intergal part of the culture, and I always wanted to make sure we got
that in place.
There aren't any surprises yet, but I'm starting to see connections from scene
to scene -- various things, like what does infertility mean to the character who's
a Roma woman, as opposed to Grace, the Canadian who had fertility problems. They're
parallel stories. How does a woman who's not able to have children in these two cultures
get treated?
Home is My Road runs from April 11 to May 11 at Factory Theatre in Toronto.
You can buy tickets through the Factory Theatre website at http://www.factorytheatre.ca/2002-2003/home.php.
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