In 2005, James Long discovered an abandoned suitcase filled with photo albums in the alley behind his house. The photographs in the albums and the process of tracing them—and even finding members of the family who “appear” in them—form the basis of Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, a play produced by Theatre Replacement and Rumble Productions, which opens at the PuSh Festival in Vancouver on January 29, 2008 and at the Theatre Centre in Toronto on March 6, 2008. Click here for ticket information.

One evening in August 2005, I took my dog, an eleven-year-old poorly trained Newfoundland cross, out for a final pee before heading off to a theatre performance. After some wandering, the dog took me around to the alley behind my home on East 14th Avenue in Vancouver, where an abandoned suitcase lay partially open beside some garbage cans. It was baby blue and there was a Come to Regina! sticker peeling off its side. I could see that it was filled with photo albums and other papers, and they were damp and mouldy and getting damper (it had been raining earlier in the day). I pulled the dog away and continued with my evening, but my attention stayed with the suitcase full of albums. I wondered who might have owned it, what ownership laws applied to garbage, and whether anyone would see me dragging it back to the house.

A few hours later I returned to the alley with my colleague and collaborator Craig Hall, picked up the suitcase, brought it in through the house, and laid it on my kitchen table. It was torn at the seams and one of its hinges had broken off.

We both began to sneeze. It was as though we’d found a body.

The suitcase contained six photo albums and two scrapbooks. Later, when we indexed the materials—which cover the period 1967 to 1987—we counted 623 photographs of 103 people. The scrapbooks documented two lengthy road trips, complete with campground receipts, newspaper articles of interest, brochure pages and pressed leaves. The first was a journey around North America in 1967—68, and the second a trip through the southern United States in 1978—79.

For the next couple of months I kept the suitcase nearby in my office, which became infused with the rich and rather nasty aroma emanating from it. Eventually the dank smell became too much to bear, and I carried the suitcase out to the dumpster in two pieces. Fortunately, the albums and the scrapbooks dried out and eventually lost their odoriferous edge. I showed them to everyone who came through my door, and there was much speculation about the lives of the unknown people who could be glimpsed in their pages: possible relationships and suspected moments of conflict, as well as the aesthetic effects of rain damage and the consequences of time passing. One of the albums, a green one with a teddy bear on the cover, we named The Mandy Book. It was devoted to photographs of a dog, a Pomeranian named Mandy.

In the summer of 2006, some friends and I took a scanner and a projector into the studio and started messing about with the albums. Eventually, working with the evidence of the pictures and their captions, and the materials in the scrapbooks, we patched together what might be a plausible history of the lives recorded in the suitcase.

The albums are the work of Ruby D, who hails originally from just outside Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. In 1967, Ruby married Clark, originally of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. Ruby would have been in her late forties and Clark in his late fifties or early sixties, and they had both been living in Trail, B.C. Clark was already the father of at least two children, both of whom had families of their own, which included Clark’s grandchildren.

Ruby came to her marriage to Clark with a single daughter, Linda, who eventually married a man named Bob and had two children, Sara and Mathew. Linda may live somewhere on the Sunshine Coast, and Sara may have suffered from addiction problems and may now live on the street. Mathew, the youngest child, died in a car accident in his late tweens or early teens.

Last summer, in 2007, we returned to the studio to dig deeper into stories and fictions that seemed to propose themselves as a way of “filling in the blanks” and exploring the lost or displaced memories in the albums with the loss and displacement of memory that we all experience in our lives.

Our stage manager recognized a costumed Mother Goose in a photograph of Sara taken when she was five years old, in 1979, on Easter Sunday at a party in the Hotel Vancouver; our stage manager had also attended that party when she was five years old. She even produced a similar photograph of herself with the same Mother Goose.

We spun narratives, made up facts and inserted traces of ourselves into the emerging stories. We invited friends in to speculate with us. We told personal stories and asked each other to repeat them back in the first person. We had a rabbit suit made—a replica of the suit worn by some poor guy who worked at the Hotel Vancouver on that Easter Sunday in 1979. We had our friends put on the rabbit suit and we videoed them doing silly tricks. In short, we played in every direction possible, trying to shake off the burden of “fact” and open up paths to association.

Finally, we invited an audience to come in and see what we had come up with. Almost every one of them wanted more on the “source material”; that is, more of Ruby and Clark, the kids, the lake and, especially, more of Mandy the Pomeranian. Our personal ruminations didn’t make for engaging theatre just yet.

But after all this time spent with Ruby and Clark and the children and Mandy, we still knew very little about them. That’s when we decided to try tracking down the family.

Four of us took the albums and drove to Christina Lake, in the interior of B.C., to look for the cottage in the photographs. We found it within a few hours, by comparing docks along the foreshore. From there we went to the local newspaper office. In less than an hour we were talking to Clark’s daughter, who lived down on the coast, and the next day we met his daughter-in-law and learned that Ruby had died in 1999—seven years before the albums in the suitcase had appeared in the alley behind my house.

Now we were no longer exploring possible stories or experimenting with fiction: we were negotiating all too real realities. Clark’s son had died only two months before we showed up in her kitchen. In a fictional world, such a discovery might lead to warm connections (“Come on in and have some coffee, let’s talk about all of it”), but in the real world it was disturbing, even threatening, once the widow learned that we wanted to base a public performance on family albums found abandoned in a suitcase.

The ramifications of that meeting are still being worked out as we revise and re-revise our performance script. Since meeting and corresponding with family members we have returned two of the albums. (Finding a definition of who “owns” the photographs has been an interesting and very complicated conversation.)

Who were Ruby and Clark? They were people with lives of their own, lives that left traces where Ruby and Clark would never have expected to leave traces—in a blue suitcase, for example, in the rain. Here are Ruby’s scrapbook entries from 1979, in Stockton, California:

11 — Mandy and I went for a stroll along Eucalyptus Trees. Two big shepherd dogs caught and killed a nice old white hen. The poor red rooster went crying back to a farm yard. We arrived in Stockton Calif. Found a nice Motel 6. Burnt my toast and set the fire detector going.

13 — Stocked up on groceries at the Safeway stores and drove to Desert Hot Springs in an awful wind. Arrived two days early but our place was ready. People glad to see us. Had a shower and hit for the hot springs pool. Really great.

January 14 — didn’t do much but sleep and swim. Nice sun.

And so it goes, page after carefully constructed page.

The albums that we passed on to Clark’s family contained many Christmas snapshots and vacation snapshots taken at the lake, and many photos of Clark, who appeared usually to be tanned and buff, holding grandchildren on horses, rowing boats with kids aboard, on fishing trips and engaging in other summer fun. There were also trips to Vancouver and an exhilarating New Year’s party.

The albums that we have retained, along with the scrapbooks, include one without a title that seems to correspond with the road trip of 1978—79. Many of the photographs are damaged beyond recognition and several have disappeared altogether. Captions standing below blank spaces still hint at the memory of that journey: “Somewhere in Vermont,” “Ruby—somewhere in Pennsylvania,” and “Clark and I somewhere in Connecticut.”

The most expansive of the albums has a beige weave cover embossed with a red sailboat and contains traces of Ruby and Clark’s life together for nearly twenty years, from 1967 to 1986. It opens at a lake in the B.C. interior, moves through a family reunion in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, and ends with Clark’s death in 1987. In a photograph at the end Clark sits in shadow, sunk into a stuffed chair; other family members lean forward and everyone is looking at the camera. The caption reads:

Jack, Clara, Jeff, Ruby, Clark—This was his final lung surgery to remove the last third of his lung. He came home from hospital yesterday. He was an ill man but also determined to survive. April 10th, he had a third surgery and lived for two years with open cavity—March 1986. He died poor darling.

Mandy Album has a green padded cover imprinted with the image of a teddy bear and a rabbit. It begins with a note of Mandy’s birth at 1975 at Fairlite Kennels in Langley, B.C. “She was the only living thing we owned together,” Ruby writes on the first page, which ends with a story of an encounter with the dog catcher:

Never a license until the dog catcher came to our door. He said, “Do you have a dog?” Clark said, “What could I do? Mandy was sitting there, bug-eyes looking at the dog catcher and she knew she was the dog.”

The Mandy Album covers Mandy’s life with Ruby and Clark and includes a sequence of studio portraits of Mandy by herself, “posing” for the camera. The final image of Mandy is a snapshot of her lying on the grass looking straight at the camera. Beneath it is Ruby’s eulogy:

This is a faded picture. Poor light. However I must prove to myself the justification for putting you to rest. Two old ladies struggling and truth was if I went first who would groom you or give you that milk bone for night snack. Clark left us—did you understand? He said you did. You changed—like a child afraid to lose me. Too. Kidney’s failing and I knew—couldn’t help it huh? Spots on the rug. However “wee girl” the road to life is bumpy. No more distemper shots that hurt and made you sore for 24 hours. You went out in style—cremation, city of Vancouver notified, so license fee discontinued. That I should be so lucky.