Stolen - first impressions

My first impressions when reading the play Stolen were conflicted, discouraged, and
sympathetic. The play begins with the characters of Ruby, Anne and Jimmy who are affected by
the 'Stolen Generation'. One thing I did happen to notice was the script is a disrupted narrative
which means that the play moves backwards and forward in time and collides with the past and
the present. The stories are not sequential. This format empowers the playwright to merge past
and present and gives the audience the hope to see how their present lives are originally joined
to their past. The play, however, begins with the characters as young children and ends where
they are at the present moment in time, the end development of all that has been lost.
Throughout the play, each character is able to establish the pain and misery of their characters.
One character which allows the audience to feel sympathy for is Anne. She is an aboriginal
female who was adopted into a comfortable home at a age by a white Australian family.
Although her relationship with her white parents is not especially a close one. In The Chosen,
Anne and her parents take turns to speak but do not precisely address each other. Sandy is the
character closest to a historic understanding of Aboriginal identity. Shirley represents the
importance of family, especially of motherhood, Shirley represents the importance of family,
especially motherhood, to happiness and to identity. As seen above, each character is a
complicated individual; furthermore, the characters represent important themes and issues.
They are also brought together in many scenes to show how their different situations share
similar features and problems. There is a clear understanding that the experience of being
stolen can take different structures and have largely changing effects on individuals. Stolen
raises many leading issues in society such as racism and discrimination, authority and control,
the abuse of ownership and power, and the loss of innocence.