“No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O'Donnell's talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analysis… The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.”
Globe and Mail
These four scripts—White Mice, Who Shot Jacques Lacan?, Radio Rooster Says That’s Bad and Over—will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct.
Inoculations documents O’Donnell’s progress through his first decade of production, from the first presentation of Over in 1993 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb! festival to 2000’s highly acclaimed, Dora-winning presentation of White Mice at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille. Covering subjects as diverse as racism and the light spectrum, these shows are provocative, innovative and riotously funny—as entertaining to experience on paper as on stage.
Critical Praise
White Mice:
“Brilliant conception… a highly amusing show and a provocative piece of theatre that insists on disturbing its audiences complacency.”
— The Globe and Mail
Excerpt
(Brothers Robert and Douglas, two white furred mice, sit around wheel of uneaten cheese and discuss the historical construction of the phenomenon known as the ‘white race.’)
Robert: The idea of Whiteness was first introduced in America in the 1800s in order to stop poor White mice from socially and politically identifying with Black and Native mice. Inventing Whiteness obscured class and forged a bogus link – the link of Whiteness – creating a White-working- class hatred toward Black and Native mice.
Douglas: The White race was invented to fight socialism?!
Robert: Whiteness is Capapapitalism.
Douglas: So, are you saying –
Robert: Yes?
Douglas: – that Whiteness is a dream, a trip, it doesn’t exist except as a code word for global domination under the aegis of euroamericanadian capital?
Robert: That, my furry friend, is exactly what I’m saying.
Douglas: And that my particular point of view –
Robert: Yes –
Douglas: –my thoughts, my gaze, my–,my–,my–
Robert/douglas: Soul?
Douglas: – is vulnerable to a monopolization process such that I, as an individual, can cease to exist –
Robert: As such.
Douglas: As such. That my very being can blend, blur and lose its
distinctive features.
Robert: What Capital can’t assimilate and integrate it will –
Douglas: Terminate.
Robert: – terminate.
Douglas: It’s like we’re dead.
Robert: The living dead.
Douglas: I find this difficult to believe.
Robert: Believe it.
Douglas: I don’t want to.
Robert: Of course you don’t.
Douglas: So I won’t.
Robert: Don’t.
Douglas: Done.
(Pause. Douglas farts)
Douglas: Whoops, I cut the cheese.
(Blackout)