A Brief History of a Brief History Play

A Brief History of a Brief History Play

The United Church of Canada had its beginnings in 1925 in a Toronto hockey arena. You can’t get more Canadian than that.

This year, as various United Church congregations and regions imagine ways to mark the denomination’s hundredth anniversary, some have been turning to a play by Scott Douglas called Maybe One?. Dubbed “a theatrical history of the United Church of Canada,” the play has been around for 35 years with several updates and rewrites since its creation.

Scott is a professional playwright who currently works as a Program Coordinator for the Centre for Christian Studies, so we thought it would be interesting to talk to him about the origins of this play and whether he thinks it still has anything to say to the United Church in 2025.

“Ted Dodd [former CCS Program Staff member] is responsible for this play in a couple of unexpected ways,” Scott says. “I first wrote the play in 1990 when I was working as a summer student at the Conference of Manitoba & Northwestern Ontario, filling in for Ted while he was on sabbatical. Part of the gig was to oversee the planning of a Conference-wide youth retreat focussing on the question ‘What does the United Church believe?’ I was an English and Theatre major at the time, so my answer to pretty much any question was always: ‘Let’s put on a show!’”

What emerged was a revue-style series of short comedic sketches, refracting key events in the denomination’s history through the lens of popular culture. The pre-1925 discussions of church union, for example, were presented as a hockey brawl between the pro-union and the anti-union teams. The debates over the ordination of women (leading up to the ordination of Lydia Gruchy in 1936), became a Punch and Judy puppet show, with the manic misogynist Punch being put in his place by early 20th Century Canadian feminist Nellie McClung.

According to Scott, the form of the play was strongly influenced by a play called Manitoba Experience, written by Ted Dodd and others for the 1984 General Council meetings in Morden, MB. “I was a teenager, growing up in Morden and volunteering as a page at the General Council. Ted and the actors rehearsing the Manitoba Experience show – which had been written as entertainment and as a way to orient delegates from across the country to the province they were meeting in – needed someone to stand at the back of the auditorium and let them know if they were speaking loud enough. I was that kid. The idea of doing church union as a hockey game is totally ripped off from Manitoba Experience’s fur trade hockey brawl between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company, with beaver pelt as puck.”

“The other importance influence,” Scott notes, “was a book called Voices and Visions, put out by the United Church Publishing House for the UCC’s 65th anniversary. That really helped me identify the events I wanted to dramatize.”

The first performance, scripts in hand, was given to a crowd of teenagers in a church hall in 1990. When the UCC General Council commissioned Scott to make the script available to congregations it got a touch-up, and again when Scott directed a performance for the 2000 General Council meeting in Toronto, and once more in 2015 when General Council asked for an update. “It’s probably been performed more in the past thirty-five years than any other play I’ve written. I had a theatre friend, with no UCC connections, tell me that he inherited a suit jacket from an uncle who had died, and in the pocket of the jacket was a folded up Maybe One script. Presumably the uncle, or at least his jacket, had been in a production at some point.”

Is there an update for 2025, to celebrate the United Church’s hundredth anniversary? “Not as such,” says Scott. “The tricky thing with a history play is you’ve got to wait to see what becomes history. Something might seem significant at the moment, but will it be remembered in ten years? Or twenty, or a hundred?” When pressed, Scott speculates that a pandemic scene might be needed. (See below.)

Although the play is a series of short sketches, each depicting a different historical event, there is an overarching theme. “It was written in 1990, which was spitting distance from ’88,” says Scott, referencing the then-contentious issue of ordination of gays and lesbians. “There was a feeling in the church that we had never encountered conflicts and divisions like this before; that it would tear us apart. And what I found looking at the history was, Oh wait, there’s always been conflict! We’ve always been on the verge of disintegration! And yet…”

That became the theme that tied the play together. “You can look at each scene as a little stand-alone nugget, but when you string them together in sequence, you get sense of a community continually wrestling with the tension between unity and diversity, or between wanting to take a stand and fear of conflict.” 

One of the recurring characters in the play is a woman named Hyacinth (Hy) Dudgeon, who emerges at various points in the church’s history to vent her disapproval at this or that change – the introduction of the “new” blue hymnbook in 1930, the New Curriculum in the 60’s, inclusive language in the 80’s. Each time she ends her rant with “I’m leaving the Church! This is the last you’ll see of me!” only to return a few scenes later with a new bee in her bonnet. “I was a regular reader of the letters to the editor in the United Church Observer (now Broadview Magazine) where there was always someone prophesying the end of the Church. And then I looked back at archives of letters to the editor from thirty or sixty years earlier, and sure enough there were the same letters. Different issues, same indignation.”

Not that there aren’t legitimate things worth complaining about. Although the play has celebratory and hopeful elements, it was never intended as UCC propaganda. “My favourite laughs are the slightly pained laughs of recognition. Most of them are from friendly pokes, though every once in a while the play slides from light-hearted spoof to edgier satire. Especially in the latest update. I was definitely in a different place in 2015 than I was in 1990.” The original version of the play featured a scene where two male characters mansplain the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women. (“Not everyone gets that scene.”) The 2015 script includes a scene where a straightjacketed United Church escape artist ties himself in knots trying to say anything about Middle East politics without becoming hopelessly entangled in controversy and critiques of antisemitism and/or Islamophobia.

Some scenes have been cut and new ones added over the years, but there’s never been a scene about Residential Schools. “Not everything in the play is funny ha-ha – there are some serious or poignant scenes – but given the tone of the play as a whole, I never came up with a way of touching on that chapter in the Church’s history without it seeming flip or insensitive.” The closest the play comes is a scene about the 1986 apology to Indigenous peoples for the Church’s failure to recognize their spirituality and culture. (A voice-mail greeting: “You’ve reached the First Nations people of Canada. Please leave your apology at the sound of the tone and …we’ll get back to you.”) “I love that the apology was acknowledged but not accepted. As if to say, ‘That’s lovely. Now let’s see if you really mean it.’”

The penultimate scene of the original version of the play was a Japanese monster movie parody, with a Godzilla-like creature representing the Church’s fear of conflict arising from the depths once more and sending everyone into a panic. By 2015 Scott was feeling that internal conflict was not the big threat anymore. Now it was shrinking finances, aging demographics, and an increasingly secular society. In the updated version, the crew of the Titanic rushes around, shifting furniture, only to be saved (or doomed?) by global warming and the melting of the iceberg. “It’s a scene about how do we tell our story as the Church? Confident and delusional? Cynical and defeatist? Is there a right way?”

“The scene ends with the line: ‘You know, if I didn’t love you so much, I’d really, really hate you.’ Sometimes that’s how I feel about the Church. I love it for its humanness and endearing foibles, but holy smokes, some days-…”

For the updated 2015 version, Scott lets go of all hints of cynicism for its final scene – a slam poetry celebration of diversity and intercultural possibilities. “It’s not great poetry,” says Scott. “Let’s be clear about that. But if you imagine that the characters on stage are all those young poets out there who are raising their voices, spitting their verses, speaking truth to power, and refusing to let the way things were define the way things will be, then you might be able hear the call to ‘misspell United until we’re un-tied’.”

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First draft of a potential new Maybe One? scene

Scene Eighteen (or so): Holy-wood Squares

[On the screen, a grid of nine people in boxes. On the stage, a TV host and two players seated very far from each other.]

Host: Welcome back to Holy-wood Squares. It’s the middle of 2020, we’ve been stuck in our houses for weeks due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, and we are going out of our minds! You know how the game works; our two lovely contestants, Shelly and John, seated about as from each other as humanly possible, will take turns picking from our panel of -… John?

[The host notices that John is wearing a Lone Ranger mask over his eyes.]

John: I had a tickle in my throat this morning, so I decided I should mask up.

Host: …OK, this is going to be a good game. Shelly, it’s your pick.

Shelly: Drew.

Host: [smiling] Drew, is this virus going to kill us all? …Drew?

Drew: [onscreen] The writers gave me a joke for this question, but… I don’t know!

Host: Shelly?

Shelly: I agree.

Host: That’s correct! Drew doesn’t know, and neither do the rest of us. John?

John: I don’t know either.

Host: Thank you, John. Who would you like to pick?

John: I’ll pick Paul.

Host: Because of the quarantine, United Church congregations have started experimenting with online worship. Paul, what are allowable elements for at-home communion?

[Onscreen is silently speaking and laughing.]

Host: Paul? Paul. You’re on mute, Paul. You need to click the little -… There you go. Want to try again?

Paul: [onscreen] No, you missed it. It was hilarious. By the way, I’m not wearing pants!

Host: John?

John: I agree that Paul’s probably not wearing pants.

Host: We’ll give it to you. Shelly?

Paul: Wait, I have great line about super-spreader events.

Host: Shelly?

Shelly: Whoopee.

Host: You’re picking Whoopi?

Shelly: No, I’m just excited to be out in public. I’ve gone through fifteen adult colouring books. I’ll pick Patty.

Host: Patty, why did it take congregations only two weeks to shift everything online, when disability activists have been requesting more accessible worship options for years and were told it was impossible? …Oh, here we go again. Patty, you’re on mute. Patty. Patty. OK, now we can see that you’re off mute but you’re just moving your lips and pretending to talk. Is that your…? OK, we’re going to have to skip this question, sorry. 

Patty: [onscreen] Whew, dodged that bullet.

Host: Not on mute, Patty. John, back to you.

John: I pick Phyllis.

Host: You’re sure?

John: I’m positive.

Host: Excuse me?

John: I’m positive.

Host: I’m sorry, everybody. John is positive. We’re going to have shut down for a couple of weeks, just to be safe. God willing, we’ll be back. …Paul, you’re still on mute. Good night, everyone.