The Webster Trilogy: Becoming The Widow Riley, The Daughter Problem & Art School Drama

This collection of plays is the story of families, in three different times and three different places.
Becoming the Widow Riley introduces Brigitte Sullivan as an about-to-graduate-from-college woman, in the middle of America’s preparation for WWII. She is Eastern, Northern and from a good family in Rhode Island. When she falls in love with a sailor from Montana, her life starts to pick up speed, sending her ultimately to Montana. Along the way, there is a shift in the atmosphere, from sunny spring in Newport, RI, to the dark war concerns across the country, and finally the spare isolation of the Great Plains. Brigitte transforms herself from being a flighty schoolgirl to a mature adult woman. Her relationships and interactions with other women are the mileposts along the way for her maturity. The professor’s lecture at the very beginning gives an outline of the new ideas about independence for Brigitte.
In The Daughter Problem, Wayne Webster is raising three daughters on a farm in northeast Montana in the mid-1950’s. His wife Irine was killed in an ice-skating accident with her twin sister Coleen. At the beginning, Wayne and his brother Rueben are discussing how Coleen’s husband Keme was also killed in an auto accident, leaving their daughter Josephine as an orphan. Wayne has taken Josephine in with his two daughters, Marie and Maeve. There is planning underway for an eighteenth birthday party for Josephine coming up. Oddly, the ghost of Irene is haunting Wayne’s dreams at night. At the party we learn that the oldest daughter, Marie, may be in the family-way by her boyfriend, a local Native Ben Hair. Wayne recruits a local woman from town, the Widow (Brigitte) Riley, to come to the party to meet his bachelor brother Rueben. She quickly grasps the situation and gets things moving.
There is a lot going on in the Webster household and for Wayne, a widower and straight-arrow Montana grain farmer, all these women around create a wonderful, problematic chaos. And he loves it.
In Art School Drama, we follow the middle daughter Josephine to art school in Montreal in 1960. It is an election year in Quebec and the dynamic young candidate for Prime Minister, Jean Lesage, is a Kennedy-esque figure who hovers over the story. He comes to Montreal to make a speech and dazzles the crowd with rousing appeal to vote for change in the sclerotic Church-dominated French bureaucracy of Quebec at the time. Josephine is finishing art school and, as an American, the politics are mostly theoretical, but the speech does expose the political divide between herself and her boyfriend Otto. Just in time, she falls in with a cadre of French speaking leftist student organizers, who expose the hypocrisy the current state of affairs, as well as their more open attitudes around romance and relationships. Through it all she is trying to finish her art project and graduate, under the watchful eye of the head of the school, Gerard Fontainebleau. Like the Lesage’s program of changes in Quebec, called the Quiet Revolution, Josephine is optimistic and hopeful about a bright new future.
Put together for the first time in this volume, The Webster Trilogy is oddly misnamed. The widow Brigitte Riley is of course not a Webster, yet. And Josephine’s father was full-blood Blackfoot native, of the Assine tribe, but she takes Wayne Webster’s name. Though she is probably not aware of it, she is probably passing as a Webster because that name would be common in Canada. I wonder if she would take up her native name later in life as an artist. We’ll see!