We propose this “Just in Time” panel session in response to recent events which have brought urgency to an important area of study. The Trump administration’s increasingly bold promotion of a patriarchal “natalism” coloured by eugenics, racism, and elitism – and the appeal of natalism beyond the US borders – highlight the need for scholarly reflection on contemporary motherhood. Our panel examines representations of motherhood in a selection of recent anglophone Canadian plays, probing their cultural and political implications. The panel’s focus on contemporary Canadian theatre we believe will open alternative perspectives on maternity; with the goal of fostering such rethinking we bring together papers which examine motherhood in relation to contested matters of nation-building, immigration, and reproduction.

This panel is also timely in another sense. Motherhood issues have been a central and ancient topic of both literature and drama; yet although scholars such as Andrea O’Reilly have laid the groundwork for its study in contemporary writing, the topic remains too little examined, especially in Canadian theatre. Drama is conspicuously absent from recent overviews of motherhood studies: O’Reilly and Podnieks’s Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts (2010) has no chapter devoted to theatre; the chapter on literature in The Routledge Companion to Motherhood (2020) includes prose fiction, life writing, and poetry but not drama. While increasing critical interest is indicated by a recent collection of essays, chiefly US focused – Stratford and Deboeck, eds., (M)Other Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21^st Century North American Theatre and Performance (2023) – there are still few book-length studies of motherhood in contemporary drama, and none focused on Canada. This session will contribute to a developing area of motherhood studies and Canadian theatre scholarship.

To promote discussion there will be three panelists who will be limited to fifteen-minute presentations. Following the formal papers the respondent, Sheila Rabillard, will address questions to the panelists and the audience to encourage a lively conversation.

We will begin with a presentation which opens key issues for the session, as Roberta Barker discusses immigrant women, sexual desire, and the birthing of a nation in “The Ocean’s Dreams: Hannah Moscovitch’s Maternal Histories.” Barker argues that Moscovitch’s Canadian history plays, What a Young Wife Ought to Know (2015) and Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (2017), offer parallel but contrasting reflections on white working-class immigrant women’s experiences of maternity. Rather than idealizing white settler motherhood as the cornerstone of the emerging nation, Moscovitch’s dramas give voice to the diverse dreams of Canada’s immigrant mothers. By exploring the clash between those dreams and the dominant power structures of the emerging Canadian nation, Moscovitch constructs white immigrant women’s desire as a force that has both furthered and been frustrated by the settler-colonial state.

The second presentation considers immigrant motherhood, its role in cultural reproduction and its intersection with Canadian institutions, from a different perspective. Yana Meerzon’s paper, “On Absent and Unavailable Mothers in the Dramaturgy of Migration: Canada Case,” examines a recurring trope in the dramaturgy of second-generation immigrant playwrights: from Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue (1995) to Jeff Ho’s trace (2017), second-generation protagonists often narrate migration stories marked by maternal silence, neglect, or loss. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the mother archetype and feminist theories of caregiving, Meerzon argues that these mothers’ absence—whether caused by trauma, displacement, or labor—shapes fragmented identities while enabling creative self-reinvention. Through analysis of narrative structure, multilingualism, and myth-making, Meerzon explores how immigrant playwrights stage maternal absence and asks how such dramaturgies seek authenticity in representing migration.

The third presentation focuses on bodily rather than cultural reproduction. In her paper “Un-Mothering: Tropes of the Unwanted Child and Motherhood Undone in Colleen Osborn’s Botched,” T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko analyzes the play’s challenge to received ideas of motherhood. Whether portrayed as virtuous or monstrous, but rarely in between, motherhood, she argues, is a state that exists almost exclusively within binaries—especially white, privileged, heteronormatively constructed binaries, despite the liminal state of pregnancy itself. Colleen Osbborn’s 2012 play “Botched” complicates this framing of maternity by creating a protagonist who is not the mother but the daughter—the living remains of a “botched,” or failed, abortion. Cesare Schotzko follows critical reception of “Botched” upon its premiere while also attending closely to its changing impact as reproductive rights in North America become not merely threatened but frequently besieged.

This session brings together scholars from central Canada and both coasts, from major research institutions and from a small liberal arts college. The participants' diverse areas of research include performance studies, theatre history, renaissance and modern drama, and women's writing.