Notes from the Playwright

It’ll never change.  I think that’s a fear for a lot of teenagers.  It’ll never change.  In the play it is Tom’s fear.  When I was fifteen it was my fear.  It will never change.  A lot of my life is in this play.  I didn’t mean for this to happen, but the only experience I can reference when it comes to being a teenager is my own.  I’m thirty-four now and it was difficult to go back almost twenty years.  I didn’t want to remember much of it.  Being fifteen was hard.  Like Tom, I was overweight, friendless, and I had problems at home; at school, I found ways to not be noticed, to stay invisible.  I think fifteen is the age when you’re still a child but you’re starting to view the world as an adult.  It was when I began to see my parents not as grown-ups who always knew what was best, but as adults with their own problems, their own fears, and their own mistakes.  I began to see how complicated life is.  How complicated it was for my family: my father was struggling with his drinking; my mother was struggling with the decision to end her marriage; my brother, sister, and I were struggling with all the fears, problems, and anger that came from being children of an alcoholic.  At fifteen, I was convinced that it would never change. 

Concrete Theatre commissioned me to write a play on bullying, more specifically, on male teen violence.  When I started to write Routes, I struggled with trying to provide a solution for the teen audience that would see this play.  I wanted to tell them how they could stop bullying—as a victim, as the instigator, or as the witness.  But it’s too complicated; there isn’t a simple answer.  After many false starts on the script, I stopped worrying about providing an answer.  I focused on telling the story of Tom, his friend Leonard, and the incident that happened on a bus in Millwoods.  I’ve tried to explore the complicated lives of the characters and show the routes that lead them to being victims of bullying, witnesses to bullying, or instigators of bullying.  At the end of the writing process, I still don’t have a solution.

In the play, Tom’s fear is that it will never change.  His hope is that it will change.  It was also my hope.  In my life, change happened because the members of my family, in their individual ways, decided our lives could no longer go on like they had been. My mother, with the support of her children, left my father. My father, with the support of the family, sobered up.  And because of those changes in my home life, I stopped trying to be invisible.  In no way were these changes simple or easy.  They happened because we, as a family, did it together.

Writing this play has given me the perspective to realize just how much my life has changed since I was fifteen.  My father has now been sober for over seventeen years.  My parents have reconciled.  My family is close.

I don’t have an all-encompassing solution to stop bullying.  I do know that if you’re in a situation that needs to change, if you’re hoping for change, you need to reach out and ask for help—a family member, a friend, a teacher, someone. 

Collin Doyle