Mythologizing the Self Through Autofictional Theatre

In 2020, while I was living in Vancouver, my father called me from my hometown of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta. By way of a distant relative, my birth mother wanted me to know that she’d discovered a note among her own late father’s belongings. This grandfather I’d never heard from, by way of a mother I’d never met, wanted to leave me a gift. It was now up to me to decide whether to accept it.

One year later, at twenty-nine years old, during the pandemic that prompted so many of us to reconsider our priorities, I quit my full-time job and relocated to Edmonton, my birthplace, to pursue an MFA in Theatre Practice. I’m sure everyone thought I was crazy, especially since it wasn’t like I’d had a prolific artistic career up until this point. I’d always been creative, occasionally writing and performing, but really I’d been far too fearful—of being poor, of being a gay cliché, of being myself—to fully commit to an artistic vocation. In a way, doing the MFA was like a second coming out. Bad enough that I had to be queer, but a theatre artist? 

I could have studied elsewhere, but I chose to exchange beautiful, progressive Vancouver for my beautiful but politically regressive home province because I had a strong intuition that I needed to return to the beginning. I had to unlearn the habit of fear that I’d learned growing up as a queer adoptee in a family who loved him, but didn’t always understand him, and I had to do it where such a struggle would be most vital, immediate, and real. Why? For the sake of my art? For the sake of my life? Or perhaps for the sake of the in-between world—the autofictional world—where I actually seem to live, and where I suspect I am not the only resident. 

Strange/Familiar, my self-mythologizing play on the themes of adoption, family, and queer belonging, was the culmination of this soul-searching process. It was also my MFA project. I defended the thesis in May 2023, independently produced and performed it across Alberta in June, and was awarded the Sharon Pollock Prize by the Alberta Playwrights’ Network in August.

The play has a clear inciting incident: a young musician receives an unexpected letter from his birth mother, whom he’s never met before. His name is Liam, like mine. He lives in Vancouver, like I used to. And, again like me, he’s adopted and queer. But this Liam has a boyfriend named Joseph, which none of my boyfriends have ever been called, as well as an imaginary friend named Julia, a doting-but-devious diva who is as make-believe in his reality as she is in mine.

Obviously, then, as a dramatization of my life, Strange/Familiar isn’t a straightforward autobiography. Instead, the play blurs personal history with artful invention, even as the medium of theatre blurs the objective reality of live performance with the subjective impact of suspended disbelief. As a result, in the world of the play, it is difficult to differentiate the facts of what really happened in my life from the fictions that never happened yet still convey the metaphorical truth of my experience.

Why write a play this way? Once I’d decided that I wanted to dramatize material from my own life, why not simply try to reproduce the facts, rather than cause so much confusion between objective reality, subjective perception/recollection, and pure fictitious invention?

Partly, I blame novelists for their bad influence. Autofiction, the method in question, names a literary practice inaugurated by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky in his 1977 novel Fils. More recently, there has been a twenty-first century renaissance of autofiction, as is exemplified by authors as diverse as Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Ocean Vuong. Moreover, autofiction is no longer confined to the novel alone. As Alison Gibbons writes, this “explicitly hybrid form of life writing,” which “merges autobiographical fact with fiction,” has also “been observed in the visual arts, cinema, theatre, and online.” Today, autofiction is a capacious mode of artistic production, which is hardly surprising given that we live at a time of breakneck technological advancement and mass mediatization. Everyone has a story to sell, from politicians to priests, from reality TV stars to researchers. We are enjoined on a daily basis to understand ourselves and our world in terms of plot, character, and point of view. Perhaps it’s not so much that artists are newly interested in adapting real life, as it is that real life has increasingly begun to resemble art.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can articulate three interrelated motivations for choosing autofiction as my method.

First, given the cultural context outlined above, I was eager to offer an epistemological provocation. Precisely by collapsing the empirical with the experiential, autofiction allows one to pose a timely critical dilemma: how to distinguish fact from fiction and, between those extremes, ascertain what one holds to be true.

I wanted an aesthetic mode that would feel to an audience like being queer and adopted has felt to me: uncertain, searching, and yet full of potential.

Second, my choice to work autofictionally was an ethical strategy. By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, I was able to dramatize—or not—the people in my life, as well as my entirely fictitious characters and myself, with sensitivity and care.

Third, I wanted an aesthetic mode that would feel to an audience like being queer and adopted has felt to me: uncertain, searching, and yet full of potential. Adoptees’ origins are often mysterious, much like the origins of sexuality and gender. Coming to know oneself, for adoptees and queers alike, is also a process of deferred revelation. I therefore sought in the shifting ground of autofiction an analogue for the shifting ground of identity and belonging.

Adoption is not a new topic in Western theatre. No less foundational a play than Oedipus Rex is also our first widely known play on the theme. “Do you know who your parents are?” Tiresias asks Oedipus, prompting his tragic search for the truth. Shakespeare, too, frequently reunites grown children with the parents from whom they were separated at birth, as in The Winter’s Tale. But these examples aren’t necessarily encouraging. We all know what happens to Oedipus. And in Shakespeare, as per Marianne Novy’s critique in Reading Adoption, parent-child reunions typically foreground “the genetic similarity revealed when [the transplanted child] meets hereditary family.” Such feelings of uncanny recognition are true to some adoptees’ experience, but not to all. And what about the adoptees who never meet their birth families, whether through choice or circumstance? What are their stories? How should they be represented?

In The Imprint of Another Life, Margaret Homans contends that “Adoption has a special relationship to fiction making. Adoption has long been seen as a fictive or ‘as if’ form of family making, fabricated or figurative instead of biological or literal.” Novy likewise notes that this “as if” quality has often been used as a pretext to disqualify or invalidate adoptive kinship bonds: adoptive parents aren’t ‘real’ parents; their children aren’t their ‘real’ children. The echoes in LGBTQ+ experience are obvious: how often are queers told that their identities aren’t viable, or that chosen families don’t constitute legitimate kinship? 

As I wrestled with how to write Strange/Familiar, I realized I needed to reframe our culture’s longstanding anxieties over parentage, breeding, and family. I wanted to reclaim queerness and adoption as inspirational subject positions, capable of speaking to the possibilities inherent not only in creating a work of art but also in creating a life.

“Fictive” isn’t a slur to me. “As if” is an enduring proposition. Since Aristotle at least, we have recognized the human instinct to mimesis. Yes, sometimes, our compulsion is hereditary, inborn: “you look just like your mother; you have your father’s talent.” Other times, however—and sometimes, at the same time—we imitate a mysterious referent only. We are uncertain, we search, we desire to become, we are full of disappointment and hope. As queers and adoptees can attest, creativity in life and art is always negotiated amid seeming contradictions, somewhere between nature and nurture, reality and illusion, and fact and fiction.

There are important differences between using autofiction to write a novel and using it to create theatre. A novel is a closed world while a live performance is an open world, and in broad terms, novels have narratives, whereas plays have plots. Novelists enchant their readers by manipulating time, space, and perspective through narrative voice. In drama, by contrast, multiple and conflicting points of view are the norm, usually without any one overarching narrative to claim authority. Time, space, and perspective need not be presented realistically in drama, but nonetheless they will always be constrained in performance by real time, real space, and real perspectival limitations. In theatre, one is always stuck with everything outside of oneself: artistic collaborators, other characters and actors, the all-important audience, and the ephemerality of the live, embodied moment. The spells that theatre artists cast are therefore necessarily partial, contingent, and collaborative.

In Strange/Familiar, I exploited the contradiction inherent in the hybrid “autofictional theatre” by situating the play within a metatheatrical narrative frame. The main action unfolds within this frame and is driven by three conflicts: between Liam and his off-stage parents, both birth and adoptive; between Liam and his fastidious boyfriend, the Apollonian Joseph; and between Liam and his unruly unconscious, as personified by the Dionysian Julia. This main action plays out behind the fourth wall, but at key intervals, Liam crosses into the narrative frame, directly addressing the audience from the unspecified future to provide exposition, context, and interiority. Ideally, this device makes Liam’s story more intimate and persuasive for the audience—at least until the moment when they realize that Julia is a figment of Liam’s fantasy, not a real person, and that he is therefore an unreliable narrator. This realization, I think, would have been less impactful had I structured the play without any narrative insight. So too would it have been less impactful when, during the closing direct address, the audience realizes that everything that has been said to them in the narration doubles as a possible reply to the letter from Liam’s birth mother. 

On the one hand, live performance, because it is plainly make-believe, can undercut its own authority if an audience’s disbelief is insufficiently suspended. On the other hand, when it succeeds, live performance has one of the strongest claims to authenticity of all the arts, because it’s happening now and for real. This razor’s edge dance is especially risky in autobiographical performances in which the real-world subject, playwright/creator, and dramatic character coincide in the same performer’s body, such as Strange/Familiar. Live performance and autobiography both make claims to authenticity and truthfulness, and I suspect that autofiction is so popular today because it neither takes such claims for granted nor rejects them outright. The prevailing affect of contemporary autofiction, as Gibbons writes, is “ironic yet sincere, skeptical yet heartfelt, solipsistic yet desiring of connection.” It is a mode which allows one to mistrust universalizing narratives yet desire to belong, and to question authority yet seek meaning. It is, in other words, a mode that incorporates the human need for belief.

Far more than any desire to disclose my own history, it was my curiosity to explore adoption and queerness as archetypes of human experience that led me to write Strange/Familiar. Although the frame narrative doubles as Liam’s possible reply to his birth mother, the audience never learns whether he sends it or if they will meet. Nor do they get to know what decisions I’ve made in real life. Any such disclosure in an autofictional piece could be gratuitous, satisfying the voyeur’s prurient desire to learn more about the artist, rather than the artist’s intention for her audience to reflect upon themselves and their world. As my hero, Joni Mitchell—that intrepid autofictional poet—once said: “The trick is, if you listen to the music and you see me, you’re not getting anything out of it. If you listen to the music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you’ll learn something about yourself and now you’re getting something out of it.”

When I performed as Liam, the play was seen by people who knew me well, by people who did not know me at all, and by everyone in-between. That is, it was seen along a spectrum of audiences who were familiar enough to distinguish some fact from some fiction to audiences who were entirely strangers and for whom the distinction would always remain dubious. Audiences’ degree of familiarity doubtless affected their reception of the work, but based on a wide array of responses I can confidently say that knowing me in real life was not a prerequisite for being moved by the play or feeling that it had something truthful to say. In the end, the facts—although they provided my first raw materials—were almost beside the point. It was a subjective experience of truth which reached my audience most profoundly.

This makes sense. Facts change, after all. We used to think the sun revolved around the Earth, but now we know it’s the other way around. One day, Oedipus knows who his parents are; the next, he discovers more accurate information. The truth, on the other hand, though it wears many masks, never really changes. We can’t always describe its nature exactly, but we know the truth when we encounter it, because it’s the thing that we believe.

In Strange/Familiar, I denied my audience a solid footing, whether epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic, and in so doing tested their belief. If I made myself familiar by sharing my story, I also made myself strange by telling it as a fiction and foregoing a tidy ending. Queers and adoptees are used to feeling strange/familiar: we are caught between mysterious origins and unknown destinies, both fearful of and desirous for self-knowledge, just like poor old Oedipus. But if Oedipus’ story has resonated for thousands of years with diverse audiences, and if my story resonated, too, it must be because there is something within the particular that has a holistic appeal. I hope I left my audiences with certain lingering questions, questions inspired by the metaphor of my story, but with universal implications. What do the words family and belonging mean to them? What does it mean to tell or witness a story which claims to be true? To believe, even for a moment, in somebody else’s myth?

Precisely because it confuses fact with fiction and reality with illusion, autofictional theatre puts us in touch with a register of truth far older than merely empirical or fictional knowledges.

For Strange/Familiar is indeed a self-mythologizing play. Precisely because it confuses fact with fiction and reality with illusion, autofictional theatre puts us in touch with a register of truth far older than merely empirical or fictional knowledges. It guides us to encounter a truth that reaches into and out of the depths of our psyches, our bodies, perhaps even our souls. I find myself compelled to close in a religious vernacular because autofiction draws us to the edge of the secular and beyond. Above all, to create an autofiction—which is also, of course, to live an autofiction—is to make a myth of oneself and perhaps even to believe it.