In Merlin Simard’s play Daddy’s Issues, grieving is not an emotion that’s exclusive to death.
“Daddy’s Issues is about this girl whose dad disappears,” the Quebec playwright said during a Zoom interview. “She decides that he’s dead because it’s easier than trying to mend the relationship.
“This sort of brings up questions like, ‘What is grief?’ ‘Do people have more grief than others?’ and ‘Can we just decide that someone is dead to us?’” Simard said.
Written by Simard, now based in Toronto, and directed by Montrealer Lior Maharjan, Daddy’s Issues is set to run at Ottawa Fringe’s undercurrents theatre festival Feb. 14 (6:30 p.m.) and 15 (4 p.m.). Tickets for the performances at Arts Court Theatre are pay-what-you-choose.
According to the festival website, Daddy’s Issues follows a transgender woman, Anaïs, who finds her estranged father’s old iPhone while moving into her new apartment. The phone, Simard noted, is the “key to them reconnecting.”
“(Anaïs is) with her partner,” said Simard, and they’re deciding whether they should unlock the phone and see what lies on the other side.”
Simard said the show explores themes of grief and transphobia.
“I often feel the narrative around grief and transgenderness is that when parents have a trans (daughter) … there’s this narrative of grieving the little boy,” Simard said. “It’s just untrue. That grief is actually transphobia.”
Simard said it’s particularly important to share stories about transgender people now.
“Trans people have always existed,” said Simard, underscoring the importance of sharing stories about transgender people in an era when U.S. President Donald Trump has issued an executive order saying the American government will only recognize two sexes and declaring “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
“There have always been more than two genders,” said Simard. “But I would say it’s also more than that, and it’s about writing our own narratives about being trans.”
Along with Maharjan, Simard co-founded Big T Collective – a performance group focused on sharing transgender and gender-nonconforming stories.
Lior Maharjan said one of the things she most appreciates about Daddy’s Issues is how the story diverges from typical transgender narratives.
“It’s really just about a person processing the same kind of stuff everybody else also processes at some point in their life,” the show’s director said in an interview. “I think (this show) gives space for these characters at a phase of their life where they’re finding out what it takes to build your space, make your home and consider your future.”
I often feel the narrative around grief and transgenderness is that when parents have a trans (daughter) … there’s this narrative of grieving the little boy. It’s just untrue. That grief is actually transphobia.
— Merlin Simard, playwright
Maharjan said she wasn’t expecting to start working with the actors, Xénia Gould and Sophie-Thérèse Stone-Richards, until about a week and a half before their festival performances. She said that the undercurrents performance is a “reading” of the show, and that the goal of the show is not to be at a final production stage.
“This is an opportunity for Merlin to get to hear the play out loud … and meet an audience and see what resonates,” she said.
Simard added that the undercurrents performances will consist of a reading with other movements across the stage.
“We’re still in a creation and workshop phase,” she said.
The show has seen other iterations since Simard wrote it in 2021, including previous readings and a recorded audio version of the play.
Alain Richer, executive and artistic director of Ottawa Fringe, said one of the aspects that drew festival organizers to showcase the play was the opportunity to “see it for the first time on its feet, essentially.”
But he added: “We were sold on the text of the script itself.”
Daddy’s Issues will be performed bilingually with English captions, as the show “refus(es) to belong to one language over another,” according to the website. Richer added that about half of the shows at this year’s undercurrents festival are bilingual, up from 20 per cent since the event’s first bilingual season in 2023.
“It’s important to be working, creating and embracing both (official languages) … particularly in Ottawa, when so many people living here consider themselves bilingual,” said Richer.
Simard said the actors in Daddy’s Issues will switch between languages mid-dialogue, and that she sees value in gaps between the audience’s understanding.
“What if we engaged with something and we didn’t understand everything?” she asked. “I think that there’s some wonder (in) maybe missing a word or two because you didn’t understand it.”
Maharjan added that she is also curious to see what the Ottawa undercurrents audience takes away from the show.
“I’m always very curious about what people may take away, and I’m always more curious about what I couldn’t even assume,” she said. “The cool thing about any sort of art is that people take away different things from it.”
