Nothing to Lose

It is 1976. In a tavern in the Point Saint Charles working class district of Montreal, three friends gather on their lunch hour and reminisce about the past. They are survivors of a decade. One is Jerry Nines, a writer who has had some success, having written a novel and a hit play. The others are Jackie Robinson and Frank Saladini, old friends of Jerry’s from the Point. They work in a warehouse across the street. During the course of their reunion, Jackie leaves his truck parked at the loading dock of the warehouse and fights the foreman, actions which precipitate a worker’s sit-down strike which David Fennario uses as a demand for workers’ control of industry.

Cast of nine men.

AUTHOR

David Fennario

Anglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the centre of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a housepainter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy-O.” David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Duplessis’ Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed and compressed. “School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I’ve been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.”