New Full Length Play: The Victory Garden Plays by Tara Meddaugh
My root cut scallions growing on the window sill! They grow noticeably every day and I would quickly transport them from shot glass to jar. If you try yourself, make sure to change the water frequently or they will stink!
How many of you decided that Pandemic 2020 would be the year you started your own edible garden? Whether it was in a luscious back yard, an upper story deck, or a window sill (friends and I started seeing how many vegetables we could grow in water jars from mere root cuts!), people all over seemed to be growing vegetation to eat like no other time in the 21st Century. In March, many of us found flour, bread and toilet paper impossible to purchase and there was a panic as we contemplated our food supply chain breaking. Growing our own produce seemed to offer stability, predictability, a tiny sense of control and perhaps even purpose during our unsettling time staying at home.
Disney’s short film to increase patriotism and put worries of the food shortage to rest.
There has been talk about a war, a battle, a fight against covid-19 and this brought my thinking back to - well, before most of our time - when the United States (and many countries) were fighting in World War 2. During this war (and the war before it), citizens from cities and the countryside alike started growing individual and community vegetable gardens, along with the farmers who were dubbed soldiers in their own right. Just like now, spaces were being repurposed, so where an old baseball field may have been used for games one year before, now it was being used as a community garden. Rooftops of city apartments grew beans and watermelons. By 1942, 40% of all fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States were grown from these local gardens. By consuming produce grown within their own communities, not only were Americans able to supplement their rations and eat better, but more commercially grown and canned produce was now freed up to be shipped to the troops overseas. Government campaigns touted “food would win the war,” complete with a 1942 Disney animated film to drive home the point. These community gardens were patriotically dubbed Victory Gardens.
My new work, The Victory Garden Plays, touches on moments during the unnerving time of a war 80 years ago, but their stories resonate now. These are people who were not fighting the war abroad, but rather, on the home front, striving to find purpose in action while feeling helpless, falling into new roles of family structure, second guessing decisions, worrying about loved ones, grieving—and yet, in the midst of these anxieties and fears, walking through the details of every day life which do not stop just because your heart is heavy. Eighty years later, I think many of us can relate.
When I began researching Victory Gardens as the backdrop for a play, I was drawn in by their momentum of purpose, success, loss and new beginnings. While the gardens went through these phases, so too did the personal lives of their caretakers during the war. From children to newlyweds, from widows to fathers—a Victory Garden could embody empowerment, guilt, connection, death. In The Victory Garden Plays, I give voice to seven short stories, chronicling a moment in time of men, women and children on the home front during WWII.
The Victory Garden Plays is a family-friendly drama/comedy comprised of 7 individual, yet connected, vignettes (5 10-minute plays and 2 monologues). It runs approximately 75 minutes.
Casting options are:
1) 7 female, 4 male, 1 female child (no doubling)
2) 4 female, 3 male, 1 female child (with doubling)
3) 2 female, 2 male, 1 female child (with doubling)
While soldiers fight abroad in WW2, those remaining on the home front strive to make a difference by creating Victory Gardens, supplementing limited food supply. But the pressures on the home front extend much further than simply growing produce. A child worries her failing rooftop garden is an omen of misfortune for her father’s return from a POW camp. An infertile woman throws her purpose into feeding neighborhood families. A wealthy man whose chemical plant is commissioned by the government for war purposes struggles with how to leave a meaningful legacy not tainted with warfare. These stories, and more, are given light in The Victory Garden Plays, a series of 7 vignettes chronicling people’s journeys with their new realities of love, growth, life and death.
Click for a free excerpt of The Victory Garden Plays.
Click below for a digital copy of the piece, The Victory Garden Plays.