New Canadian Kid: A Play for Young People

David E. Kemp is a drama professor at Queen’s University and the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

In the spring of 1980, Dennis Foon, Artistic Director of The Green Thumb Theatre in Vancouver, worked with a group of students in a local school. The purpose of the workshops was to create a play on the experience of immigrant children in Canada. The children, mostly immigrants themselves, interviewed other New Canadians who spoke about their experiences. The resulting transcripts were then edited into a script entitled “Immigrant Children Speak,” which was performed by the drama club in the school. Dennis Foon’s original intention was that the Green Thumb Theatre would produce the script using adult professional actors, but the director, Jane Howard Baker, had a different idea. She wanted to create a new script in which the Canadians would speak gibberish and the immigrants English so that the audience would feel the experience through the immigrants’ eyes. Thus New Canadian Kid by Dennis Foon was born.

New Canadian Kid is based on the premise that any person coming to a new country experiences tremendous culture shock, a trauma that is intensified by negative reactions coming from people already resident in that country. Foon has deliberately not chosen a specific country from which his immigrants stem. The imaginary country of “Homeland” is meant to stand for all countries whose people have immigrated to Canada; a production note strongly suggests that it is important to keep the clothing of the immigrants different from, and strange to, Canadians (and the audience) but not identifiable with any particular country. The focus of New Canadian Kid is firmly on the situations shared by most new immigrants. Like all good theatre for young people, the play is an ideal vehicle for launching discussion and projects about its theme — in this case the nature of different cultures and the response of those cultures to the Canadian identity and vice versa. The result is a moving, insightful, and often humourous theatrical event. Not only can the young audience identify with the thoughts and fears of New Canadians, but they can identify and learn, through the play’s construction, what it is like to be bombarded by a language they cannot understand. John Lazarus has said of the play, “It is cheerfully funny and terribly serious. It says what needs to be said.” It also deserves and demands to be produced where the influx of large new immigrant populations is causing misunderstanding and distress.