A moving play, inspired by the story of the infamous Dionne quintuplets, by Deborah Porter, and directed by CountyStage’s Heather Braaten, is now on at Mount Tabor.

The Paquette sisters, Sylvie, Adele, Josee, Mariette, and Therese, are quintuplets who grow up in the limelight of their infamous birth. The play moves through their early childhood, inside a hospital, through a dreamy adolescence, to an adulthood rife with tragedy. 

The Dionne Quintuplets were born in 1934 in Corbeil, Ontario. The news of the girls was a rousing sensation – they were the only quintuplets on record to survive the first days of infancy. The Ontario government stepped in, ostensibly to protect them. Instead, it made the family a cornerstone of a tourist trade that came to be worth half a billion dollars. 

Flowers beautifully explores what it means to become an individual when you’ve been raised to be a group sensation. 

Like the Dionnes, Porter’s Paquette sisters are raised by doctors and nurses in a hospital for the first several years of their lives, with a gawking public invited in to observe. 

The actors who play the five Paquettes, Susan Del Mei, Madison Hayes-Crook, Breanna Maloney, Lindsey Middleton, and Kait Post, also play the other figures who surround the girls: reporters, doctors, parents, and siblings, to suggest overlapping identities.

Even when their parents finally regain custody, the sisters continue to live in the freak-show matrix they were born into. They can never escape their famous name. While their parents try to give them a protected, private life, the watchful eye of the public continues to follow. 

As sensational as this story is, it also suggests a heightened representation of the child-rearing anxieties that emerged in the mid-20th century. Mothering, more than ever before, became a science, and the experts were increasingly called in to regulate it every step of the way. 

At the same time, the walls of the nuclear family were closing in. Historian Hannah Zeavin, in Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, notes the emerging fear: “the more permeable the family was to mediation from the social, the more catastrophic for the family, and especially the child within.” 

In Flowers, the tension between inside and out is established in the first act and supplies the emotional matrix the Paquette girls struggle to resolve. They are confused, torn between attachment to their mother, and to the nurses that stand in for her. While the medical staff keep the girls on strict diets, “Maman” indulges them with candies. Yet she is kept at a distance, not able to fully mother her many children.

The actors who play the five Paquettes, Susan Del Mei, Madison Hayes-Crook, Breanna Maloney, Lindsey Middleton, and Kait Post, seamlessly transition into playing other figures who surround the girls: reporters, doctors, parents, and siblings. 

The play asks how to become one when you were born five. The answer is found back at the original source, their mother. Returning home to visit Maman on her deathbed, Sylvie says, “before there was five, there was one.” 

It’s a circle, not unbroken. 

Flowers is on at the Mount Tabor Playhouse until August 16th.