No White Picket Fence

A powerful verbatim play about young women’s resilience through foster care, No White Picket Fence is drawn from a research project involving in-depth interviews conducted by social work professor Sue McKenzie-Mohr with ten individuals who, as girls, grew up in the foster-care system and now identify in their own ways as living well. The play’s dialogue is entirely verbatim – that is, drawn word for word from interview transcripts featuring all of the “word stumbles” (ums, ahs, and incomplete sentences) of regular speech, lending the play its raw, hyperreal feel. No White Picket Fence follows the women’s unique stories in their own words from their experiences before being taken into care, through their time in care, into their current lives navigating the world as young adults. Their stories are raw, characterized by times of turmoil and suffering in their original family homes and later during impermanent arrangements in foster care and group homes. And yet these women’s stories also highlight their persistent efforts to move toward living well on their own terms. Above all else, these are stories of resistance, resilience, and strength of the human spirit. Their accounts shed light on the urgency for greater and sustained efforts to improve a care system that struggles to meet the basic needs of the youth it is mandated to protect and nurture.