Rallying Cry

In 1974, thirteen-year-old Janice Derbyshire was raped by a group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys in a pickup truck. No one came to help her. She was left “dishevelled and confused” behind a “faded-green grain elevator in southern Alberta.” Twenty-eight years later, Janice is no longer Janice. They are Joshua Dandelion, or JD, a “genderqueer, lesbian woboy who can make the sun stop in its tracks and is seen as a weed but has incredibly useful properties.” They are also hearing voices, barely clinging to sobriety, and relying on a convoluted cocktail of prescription drugs to deal with the traumatic memory that threatens to crush them. This all makes for an “emergency”— an anagram of which gives the Vancouver-based comedian and playwright JD Derbyshire the title of their debut novel.

Adapted from Certified, their participatory stage show, Mercy Gene is a...