Hear Me Looking At You is a dramatic performance of imaginative, ethnographic

memory work developed from research with three entangled life sto ries: a grand-

mother’s, a father’s and a daughter’s, in Ireland and in Canada. I interweave fragments

of remembered experiences and re-telling of family tales, research with archival

documents, photographs, letters and diaries, and interviews, readings of scholarly

literature, and stories that told themselves as they emerged through a process of

performance creation. I want to provoke talk about families, politics, humour, love,

and rage; about exile and home, pride and shame, loyalty and betrayal; about para-

doxes and contradictions. Questions about desires for reconciliation—and perhaps

the undesirability?—of forgiveness, infuse this performance.

THE STORY begins in 1992 when I visit my father for the last time in a nursing home

for Alzheimer patients in Dublin, Ireland. In erratic moments of lucidity, he surprises

me with insights into his own life’s stories and our family’s history. The experience of

this visit continues to haunt me long after my father dies, compelling me to explore

matters I had long considered settled.

ACT 1 enacts my remembered and imagined experiences—some hilarious and

others disturbing—as a ”red diaper” child of an Irish father and a Jewish mother living

an unconventional life travelling between Canada, California and Ireland in the 1950s.

This act concludes in 1961 when I settle in Montreal with my mother, leaving my father

in Ireland.

ACT 2 invites you to join me on a journey through a research process I begin in 2006

and that unexpectedly leads me to read a cache of letters my father wrote between

1961 and 1991. My telling of my own life story shifts as I read the man who was my

father emerging through his written words: a man cursed by an exile’s dream.