When Dawn begins hanging around with a "tough-looking" Vietnamese boy, Maureen suspects the young man of gang affiliation, an accusation that is somewhat understandably characterized as racist by her recalcitrant daughter. Like just how terrible this place is."Īs a young mother of a newborn, Maureen maintained aspirations of ascending to a more materially comfortable lifestyle: "Maureen and her husband had dreamed of one day belonging to the fancy clubhouse, a white-pillared mansion mirrored by an artificial pond, its paired swans circulating among the reeds." A successful interior designer, Maureen has managed to ascend the social ladder, though she remains at a remove from her daughter, whose increasingly delinquent behaviour – faking illnesses, cutting class, sneaking out at night – raises alarm bells with her mother and the school's officious guidance counsellor.
"Although the play did make me realize a lot of things. "It's not about the play," she tells her mother, Maureen, recapitulating Rose's attitude toward her hometown of Hanratty, Ont. In Powell's story Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Dawn, a disaffected teenager – "a large, solitary girl who seldom brought friends home" – longs to be cast in her school's play, in part as a flight from her unhappy suburban existence. Then again, Powell's characters – vulnerable figures frequently forced to don a veneer of toughness, who yearn for an escape from their straitened circumstances – do bear a certain resemblance to Rose, the young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who dreams of breaking away from the shackles of her small-town existence, eventually becoming an actress.
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