Imaginary Worlds in Maggie Gallant's
Betwixt & Between
Spoiler Alert: The following chapter discusses Maggie Gallant’s one-act play, Betwixt & Between, at length and assumes that the reader has engaged with the play in its entirety. You can watch the play on YouTube and learn more about the playwright by visiting Maggie Gallant’s website at https://maggiegallant.com/
Maggie Gallant’s play Betwixt & Between is named after a chapter from Betty Jean Lifton’s book Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness where Lifton likens adoptees to Peter Pan, fantasy fiction’s canonical lost boy. As Lifton explains, “adoptees recognize Peter Pan . . . They, too, became lost children when they separated as babies from their natural families and disappeared into a place very much like never-never land” (Journey 3). The play debuted as a Zoom play at the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) 2021 conference and portrays the protagonist, Lucy, and two imaginary characters interacting in adult Lucy’s imagination, which is referred to as Betwixt & Between (“Elevation”). The audience witnesses several of Lucy’s childhood fantasies relating to her adoption unfold in her imagination as she sits in the Bureau of Vital Statistics at New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene after the New York State Senate’s 2019 passage of the Clean Bill of Adoptee Rights. Although the play is fictional, the bill—which allows adult adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates—was passed in reality and went into effect in January 2020. Much like Brian Stanton’s film, this play argues for adoptees’ access to biological truth; in this case, focusing on access to sealed birth records. The setting of Lucy at the Vital Statistics office on her birthday protests the reality that adoptees in 40 states (at the time of this writing) are still not legally entitled to their original birth certificates. Additionally, the title also pays homage to what Lifton wrote about shifting adoption practices: “We are Betwixt and Between change and stasis in the adoption field. We are between two systems: the traditional closed one that for almost half a century has cut adopted children off from their heritage, and an open one in which birth mothers choose the adoptive parents of their baby and maintain some contact with the family” (8). Setting the play immediately after the S3419 bill passed thereby keeps alive Lifton’s hope that records be made more available to adoptees, further reducing the amount of secrecy surrounding the practice.
Betwixt & Between demonstrates a wholly different interpretation of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory than Stanton’s film. Both were influenced by Lifton’s work, and Gallant says in a guest blog post that, “When I read Betty Jean Lifton’s description of the Ghost Kingdom, I experienced an incredible moment of recognition and understanding. I wasn’t alone. It wasn’t my fault” (“Living”). Instead of focusing on crossing over into the Ghost Kingdom by seeking reunion as Stanton’s film, however, her play focuses on the introspective Ghost Kingdom where Lucy’s what-if scenarios and ghost characters reside. The entire play takes place in Lucy’s daydream, which can be interpreted as her Ghost Kingdom, as she sits in a Vital Statistics office waiting to receive her original birth certificate.
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In that Ghost Kingdom, which is an example of an imaginary world, she interacts with counterfactual characters from her own Ghost Kingdom and her adoptive father’s Ghost Kingdom who help her walk through some of her previous fantasies about her adoption. Dominating the narrative are several what-if scenarios and thought experiments that, in the absence of truth, hang empty and haunt Lucy, who as an adult has shut herself off from her fantasies until now. This play uses counterfactual characters, possible worlds, and an imaginary world as narrative strategies to reflect the real-life consequences of being haunted by the gap of personal and biological history. The play walks viewers through two of the possible scenarios that could have happened had she not been adopted or if her adoptive parents had their own biological child. Instead of depicting alternate timelines to represent such counterfactuals, as many narratives do, the play instead introduces two imaginary characters to represent the alternative scenarios. The first of these characters, Eloise, is the person Lucy might have been had she stayed with “mama,” her biological mother. The second character, a caseworker, turns out to be the “phantom” daughter created by Lucy’s adoptive father. These two characters help Lucy process some of her fantasies so that Lucy can uncover the reason she took the time to gain access to her original birth certificate.
Like Stanton’s film, Gallant’s play is a piece directed towards a specific discourse community. Built on the premise of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, the play seeks to engage with and add onto the ongoing conversation that Lifton initiated. It does so by portraying an interpretation of a Ghost Kingdom by using several narrative models which, in turn, allow the audience to explore not only Lucy’s adoptee-centered Ghost Kingdom, but also the Ghost Kingdom of her adoptive father. In this sense, not only does Lucy explore the possibilities of scenarios that affect her and her life, she comes to realize that she is not the only person in her family that has suffered because of her adoption.
When she is introduced to the audience, Lucy has deeply repressed her fantasies and feelings about her adoption. She is cynical, defensive, and seemingly disinterested in pondering what-ifs. She makes several remarks to Eloise and her caseworker (the two characters she meets in her daydream) including “I’m sorry that I’m a realist,” (Gallant, Betwixt 5) and “Better drowned than adopted,” (Gallant, Betwixt 15) in response to their inquiries about how she feels about her adoption. Her irritation with the other characters’ inquiries emphasizes her reluctance to engage with her feelings about adoption. As the play progresses, the audience watches her begin to slowly engage with the various kinds of trauma she endured and never took the time, until now, to process. The fantasies that she explores in her Ghost Kingdom illuminate some of the ways in which she has experienced harm because of adoption. As she continues to engage with the characters in her Ghost Kingdom, she gains more control over her fantasies until finally she allows herself to feel all the emotions she has long been repressing.
Possible Worlds
Topics including the trauma of separation at birth, betrayal, fear, and more all come under the microscope as Lucy converses with Eloise and the caseworker, Sabrina, in between replays and reworkings of her childhood fantasies. These fantasies all represent possible worlds inside one larger possible world, Lucy’s Ghost Kingdom, and primarily focus on the complex emotions that adoptees must learn to navigate because of the complicated nature of their existence. For example, Lucy finds it difficult to believe that she was born: she assumes that she must have been, but it is a gap of memory that affects how she sees herself. She jokes, “Maybe I was left behind by aliens, maybe I was found in the drawer of an antique dresser. Maybe I’m a robot. Or was hatched from a file marked Top Secret. Maybe I was created by Dr Frankenstein in a lab” (Gallant, Betwixt 27-28).” While Lucy’s comment is sarcastic, it does reflect the kinds of fantastic stories that adoptees often imagine to fill the gap in their own birth story.
The caseworker’s response is to point out to Lucy that being separated from her birth mother was a traumatic event. The adoption community is familiar with this argument as it echoes Nancy Verrier’s proposed “Primal Wound” theory, which argues that when infants are separated from their mothers, a deep psychic wound occurs (xvi). This kind of birth-related trauma is emphasized when the audience finds out that the entire play takes place on Lucy’s birthday. Adoptees often struggle with birthday celebrations, because what is a traditional celebration for many is a reminder of that initial loss for adoptees. Unlike kept children, the event of their birth may not seem real to them, as they often have only heard their adoptive parents’ stories about when they came home; some adoptees may not even know their exact day of birth, given their circumstances. Lucy and the characters in her Ghost Kingdom discuss the dissonance Lucy feels has between knowing she was born (because she exists) and believing that she was born, despite the lack of a coherent birth story. The caseworker attempts to persuade Lucy that even if she does not know her birth story, she is still connected to her birth mother. She encourages Lucy to touch her belly button, explaining , “You’re real. You’re not imagined, or dreamed up or wished for. You’re here. This is how you were connected to your birth mother and you’ll always wear the scar” (Gallant, Betwixt 28). This moment is significant because it focuses on how Lucy recognizes and processes her loss.
Lucy’s conversations with Sabrina, the caseworker, and Eloise, her alternate self, also reflect adoptees’ often complicated feelings of fear and betrayal. Through talking with them, Lucy considers the possibility that her adoptive mother lied to her about the letter she received the day before her thirteenth birthday. Lucy’s adoptive mom opened the letter sent from the adoption agency without her. Then came downstairs crying and told Lucy that her birth mother had died in an accident. Eloise then plays out a fantasy-within-a-fantasy reliving Lucy’s childhood fear that her birth mother had died in a car crash on her way to come get her. Eloise then pointedly suggests Lucy should have read the letter for herself. She drops a bomb that contradicts what Lucy has chosen to believe about that moment, suggesting that the letter from the adoption agency simply asked for a picture of her to help her birth mother cope with difficult times (Gallant, Betwixt 19). Considering the possibility that her adoptive mom could have lied to her angers Lucy and spurs her to begin asking the kinds of questions that eventually lead her to better understand her previously repressed feelings about her adoption. The audience can speculate that, if the space that Lucy is occupying is her own Ghost Kingdom, perhaps some part of her always feared that her adoptive mother had lied to her about the contents of the letter, but had repressed it in order to shield herself from the pain.
These complex fantasies-within-fantasies in the form of conversations with Eloise and Sabrina are manifestations of Lucy re-working her Ghost Kingdom. We see Eloise re-enact one of Lucy’s former possible worlds, a fear-induced fantasy Lucy previously concocted of what life would be like if she had stayed with “mama,” including homelessness and meth addiction. By suggesting Lucy should have read the letter, Eloise now creates another possible world, one where Lucy’s birth mother may still be alive. This possible world forces Lucy to confront her fear that her adoptive mother may have betrayed her by lying to her, and that she left a possibility open by not demanding to read the letter for herself when she was thirteen. The playwright is using this imagined conversation as a narrative device to show us exactly what kinds of possible worlds—even worlds within worlds—that adoptees can create in their Ghost Kingdoms.
The play also reminds us, however, that the adopted child is not the only person in the adoption circle that may create possible worlds. There is a moment in the conversation between Eloise and the caseworker that both Lucy and the audience realize at the same time, then, that the caseworker is Sabrina, the phantom daughter created by her adoptive father. As Lifton explains, adoptees are not the only ones in the adoption circle haunted by ghosts (11). Talking to Sabrina, Lucy considers that her father might also have had daydreams of the daughter he never had. As Sabrina describes his fantasies of her as the “daddy’s girl” that Lucy never was and how they were complicated by Alzheimer’s before his death, Lucy is able to confront her feelings about her relationship—or the lack thereof—with her father. Through replaying fantasies and conversation between the three of them, finally Lucy realizes that instead of repressing or relying on the fantasies in her Ghost Kingdom, she should confront her adoptive mother and seek out her birth mother in order to seek out the truth.
Portal Fiction
The play begins with narration introducing the setting of the play with the date (significant to New York’s recently passed Clean Adoptee Rights bill) and the location of the Vital Statistics office where Lucy sits and waits for her number to be called in order to claim her original birth certificate. Because the introduction of the play depicts a lifelike character amidst a real historical event, the play can be described as realistic fiction. In other words, the beginning of the play indicates to viewers that even if the character is fictional, the setting is mimetic, with a complex protagonist and recognizable society.
After the setting is established, Lucy closes her eyes and the narrator describes the scene transition as a chalk circle emerges on the screen. When she opens her eyes again, another character has appeared, a thirteen year old girl sitting in front of a birthday cake with the chalk circle behind her. The young girl plays both herself and her mother as she reenacts a mother singing “Happy Birthday.” Lucy’s vacant facial expression indicates that perhaps she is daydreaming as this plays out.
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It is soon confirmed that this is indeed the case, but in this moment, both the audience and Lucy are unaware of the transition from reality to daydream.
Suddenly, the birthday scene turns into horror as the young girl bites into her cake and finds it filled with bugs. The third character enters at this point, trying to calm down the young girl as Lucy watches, smirking. After the young girl is calm, the third character calls out to Lucy who, unsure at first how to react to this woman speaking directly to her, eventually cooperates and speaks with the two other characters. Lucy recognizes the young girl as Eloise, an imaginary version of herself she created when she was young. This recognition most likely confirms viewer’s suspicions that Lucy is somewhere that is not the Vital Statistics office. The other character, who she is unfamiliar with, introduces herself as Lucy’s caseworker. The caseworker coaxes Lucy to cross into the chalk circle, which Lucy stumbles over. She begins to wonder if she is hallucinating, but the caseworker reassures her that she was daydreaming and informs her that she is now in “The Gap,” or what many in the play’s initial audience in the adoption community may have recognized as her Ghost Kingdom.
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The chalk circle represents an entryway or a portal into Lucy’s fantasy, so the play can therefore be understood as what Farah Mendlesohn calls a “portal fantasy” (xix). Many pieces of fantastic fiction use portals to signify that a character is leaving the world previously established in the narrative and entering an alternative, usually fantastic, world. A portal can be any kind of entrance—a door, closed eyes, a wormhole, or even a rabbit hole—that signifies a move between spaces with different ontological significance within the narrative. Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an excellent example. In his novel, the rabbit hole Alice falls through is the portal to the fantasy world known as Wonderland.
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As Jennifer Harwood-Smith explains, “Portals can serve an important narrative purpose, as they allow the protagonist to move to new locations instantaneously or at least faster than would normally be allowed” (57). Since the play’s setting in the Vital Statistics bureau immediately attunes viewers to a real historical moment, there must be a relatively quick transition into the imaginary world where Lucy will realize, as the audience has, that she is daydreaming.
Even after Lucy stumbles over the chalk circle and enters into the new space, the audience still needs a little bit more context to understand the transition from the seemingly real world they were introduced to and the fantastic world Lucy has entered. After Lucy gets over the shock of seeing her childhood imaginary self, the so-called caseworker proceeds to tell Lucy that she is in The Gap, which she explains as “the space in between who you were the day you were born and who you became from the day you were adopted” (Gallant, Betwixt 4-5). The Gap is also a play on words because the playwright grew up in Britain, and it alludes to the London Underground’s famous “Mind the gap” message.
This explanation is beneficial to both Lucy and the audience. Audience members who are a part of the adoption discourse community will likely recognize the caseworker’s explanation as reminiscent of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory. The caseworker goes on to confirm that Lucy is actually in a daydream, explaining to her that “a lot of children do go through a phase where they fantasize about having better parents. They create their own version of a fantasy self. [...] but you adoptees tend to hold on” (Gallant, Betwixt 9). This line is an allusion to Freud’s family romance theory, where he argued that all children fantasize about having better, even royal, parents. Lifton references this theory in her book, when she explains that the problem is that an “adoptee really does have another set of parents out there somewhere” (Journey 61). When the caseworker says that adoptees hold on to such fantasies, she is referring to the lifelong impacts of missing personal information that incline adoptees to create and maintain fantasies for longer than other children.
Lucy’s unfamiliarity with the imaginary world she has entered is common in portal fiction. As Benjamin Robertson explains, “Because the world of a portal fantasy must be entered, that world will likely, if not always, be unfamiliar to the one who enters (and the reader as well). Moreover, the presence of the portal itself, which serves as a threshold between one world and another and thus between one set of rules and another, signals a difference in backstory” (Robertson, “Backstory” 40). In other words, the chalk circle, as the portal, signifies the difference between Lucy’s daydream and the world she just left where she sits in the Vital Statistics office. Once she utilizes the portal to travel to a different world, she will need some context to understand where she has arrived. The caseworker provides this explanation to her and as such, serves as an important narrative device to help both Lucy and the audience navigate the new space. As Robertson points out, “portal fantasy nearly always involves explanation by a character familiar with the world to a character not familiar with the world” (“Backstory” 40). Just as Hagrid helps introduce Harry Potter to the wizarding world, the caseworker helps explain the space she calls both The Gap and Betwixt and Between to Lucy in order to orient not only Lucy, but the viewers as well.
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In analyzing Lucy’s travels to and from this other world, it is also possible to interpret Betwixt & Between as a quest narrative. Mendelsohn argues “Modern quest and portal fantasies rely on very similar narrative strategies because each assumes the same two movements: transition and exploration” (2) and suggests that most portal fantasies are indeed quests. Knowing that Gallant was directly inspired by Lifton’s theory, it comes as no surprise to find elements that recall Campbell’s hero’s journey, a critical influence on its creation. The play’s narrative follows the three major arcs of the hero’s journey, strongly reminiscent of tales like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as it depicts Lucy entering her daydream at the beginning (Departure), interacting with her own inner fantasies (Initiation), then returning to the real world a changed woman (Return). Although Lucy is surprised to find herself in her imaginary world conversing with fictional characters, these characters have a purpose in visiting with her: they guide her through an inner journey that leads to insight, wisdom, and a changed resolve by the time she returns to reality. The purpose of her quest, though she does not initially realize it, is for Lucy to identify her true feelings about her adoption so she can gain the courage to seek out the truth instead of allowing what-ifs to haunt her. The play concludes with Lucy’s stumbling once again out of The Gap, a liminal space between reality and fantasy, as she exits the chalk circle with new knowledge of herself and returns to the Vital Statistics office where her number is called so she can finally receive her original birth certificate.
Counterfactual Characters, Alternate Histories, and Possible Worlds
The two characters that Lucy engages with in her daydream (or Ghost Kingdom) are symbolic representations of what George Carstocea refers to as uchronias, alternate or counterfactual histories. He defines uchronias as “works of fiction that emerge from the difference between an established narrative timeline and a ‘what-if’ scenario: if a given event is assumed to have gone differently, then the change in that event has repercussions for the flow of time beyond the point of divergence” (184). In the case of Betwixt & Between, all three of the characters represent a different timeline. Lucy represents the established narrative timeline, the mimetic storyworld where she was relinquished and adopted and now waits in the Vital Statistics office. Eloise and Sabrina signify two separate “what if” scenarios, but rather than the play depicting two diverging scenarios laid out as a speculation in plotline, the characters themselves serve as embodied representations of those possibilities. Each character is a projection of what might have been. Eloise, who Lucy admits to having created as a child, is the person Lucy might have become had she stayed with her birth mother. The caseworker, on the other hand, is the wished-for daughter that Lucy’s father might have had if he and his wife did not struggle with fertility issues.
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Besides the two characters who embody these counterfactual alternate histories, though, this play also explores what-if thought experiments by replaying some of Lucy’s past fantasies. For example, Eloise plays herself in one of Lucy’s dark fantasies in which she stays with her birth mother who she imagines struggling with substance abuse and abject poverty. Because Lucy did not stay with her birth mother, this is an imagined possible world that serves as an alternate scenario to what has occurred in Lucy’s actual world. Another example is the fantasy in which Eloise plays Lucy’s birth mom who is driving in the rain on the way to Lucy but crashes instead. Lucy conjures this alternate scenario out of fear and guilt. She explains that she thought her birth mother died because she used to wish her adoptive mother would die so her birth mother could come and take her. She says, “I thought my birth mom dying was god’s punishment for me being ungrateful and wanting something so horrid” (Gallant, Betwixt 20). In the absence of truth from her adoptive mother and the lack of open communication, Lucy has conjured this possible scenario in order to cope with her guilt and grief.
Lucy’s fantasies represent different possible worlds, all counterfactual in their own way, but that does not mean they are disconnected from the actual world. Understood from the perspective Matt Hills calls “moderate realism,” it is possible to “‘view alternative worlds [...] as abstract, hypothetical scenarios within our actual world” (433). Within this framework, as George Carstocea explains, “alternate worlds exist only through the exercise of the imagination rather than as ontological fact, but their speculative impact may well teach us something about our real world” (187). For my purposes, Lucy’s Ghost Kingdom in its entirety can be called an alternate world because it is built from her imagination, but it also benefits her perspective towards her real-life situation to have considered the scenarios presented as both character representations of different possible timelines and what-if scenarios presented as fantasies. By entering into her Ghost Kingdom daydream, Lucy is able to visualize the consequences of different timelines and experiment with different scenarios through her fantasies, both helping her come to terms with the past and potentially lessening her uncertainty about the future. Because the act of adoption itself is such a significant hinge moment on which infinite possible worlds rest, it makes sense that an adoptee might explore those possibilities by conjuring them as thought experiments.
Imaginary Worlds
All of these what-if scenarios and possible characters occur in Lucy’s Ghost Kingdom which is, in itself, an imaginary world. The beginning and end of the play, set at the Vital Statistics office, are what Marie-Laure Ryan would call the “textual actual world,” what we might call the “real world” inhabited by the protagonist (“Ontological” 74). Once Lucy crosses the threshold into her daydream, she experiences an ontological shift to the private universe of her Ghost Kingdom, where it is difficult to judge exactly what is fantasy and what is not. As Ryan explains, “imaginary worlds can be situated at variable distances from the world we regard as actual or primary” (“Ontological” 74). And yet, even as the narrative’s move into the imaginary world of Lucy’s Ghost Kingdom signals an exaggerated fantasy, the audience can still accept there is a truth quality to the experience. On one level, this is a simple function of the immersive power of fictional narratives. As Ryan argues, “ [if] we immerse ourselves in the storyworld, then the textual assertions become automatically true in the storyworld by virtue of the performative power of fiction, a power that enables fictional texts to create imaginary objects and worlds by simply referring to them” (“Ontological” 74-75). Gallant’s use of the fantasy portal facilitates that immersion: we can easily move from our world to a “textual actual world” just like it, and the portal device then helps us move seamlessly, as Lucy does, into the imaginary world of her daydream. Within the play’s storyworld, Lucy’s daydream is just as real as any encounter she might have in the Vital Statistics office. It becomes, then, a viable space to engage in a more fantastical version of the kinds of thought experiments that explore possible scenarios and counterfactuals that all daydreams represent.
Lucy’s imaginary world is constructed entirely by her imagination, sometimes actively, sometimes unintentionally, where what-if scenarios and other fantasies play out about her adoption. As the play progresses from Lucy’s bug-filled birthday cake fantasy to the final fantasy where Lucy almost drowns Sabrina, there is a gradual shift in how much control Lucy has over the fantasies she creates in her imaginary world. Although the caseworker and Eloise seem to be able to converse on their own with Lucy, often chastising Lucy for having such dark fantasies or being miserable, they are not fully in control of the fantasies as they play out, especially towards the beginning, signifying that this imaginary world is still Lucy’s. This progression of Lucy’s ability to purposefully control her fantasies as they play out signifies her emotional transformation. The shift in her interactions with Eloise and Sabrina clearly show she has gone from suppressing her Ghost Kingdom to using it as a space to explore her emotions. Only once she has played out these scenarios is she prepared to return to the Vital Statistics office and pursue the truth of her birth mother.
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This play gives its viewers a very intimate looking-glass with which to experience the inner world of an adoptee who wants more information about themselves yet also has retreated into fantasies to cope with the lack of information. By establishing the play’s textual actual world in New York in 2020, the play argues that adoptees should have access to their original birth certificates and have the opportunity to seek out the truths surrounding their adoptions. The play uses portal fiction strategies to transport Lucy from her actual world into her Ghost Kingdom where she plays out fantasies that are all derived from one question: what if?
From the outside, all these layered possibilities and thought experiments can be understood as Lucy’s cognitive process to cope with and prepare for all the unknowns about her adoption. By creating an internal imaginary world, or as Lifton would call it, a Ghost Kingdom, she has a space to explore the possibilities she has been discouraged from examining in the actual world where laws are still in place to keep information about adoptees away from them. With her play, Gallant successfully illustrates the different kinds of Ghost Kingdoms that adoptees create in order to process all the trauma of adoption, especially in lieu of access to their records.
To Say Goodbye by Ferera Swan
Ferera Swan is a Filipino-American adoptee who shares her personal journey through her work as a recording artist/musician and writer, exploring the complexities of adoption, trauma, grief, shame, and reunion.
“Adoptee grief is largely misunderstood by those outside of this life experience. We grieve our mothers, families, our roots. I believe it’s in allowing ourselves to hold grief and gratitude simultaneously—the integration of both—where we can truly discover healing." - Ferera Swan
You can find more of her work on her website.