Rebecca Déraspe is no stranger to controversial subjects. Gametesin 2017, addressed, for example, the decision to carry a child with Down syndrome to term or not, while The ICESin 2022, dealt with the consequences of a sexual assault reported many years after the fact. In Fannycurrently being performed at the Théâtre du Bic, Déraspe provokes an encounter between a young woman with highly progressive ideas and a more traditionalist middle-aged couple. The clash of ideologies could certainly be virulent, fueled by mutual contempt. However, this is not the avenue that the playwright has chosen to take: “We all have the same play that comes to mind,” she admits, “when we think of this premise. I didn’t want to go there. In fact, I wanted to start exactly like what this play would be.” [hypothétique] and then defy expectations.”
So, rather than a confrontation, it is an encounter that takes place. Fanny and Dorian will be influenced by the freedom of thought of Alice, a student they have welcomed into their home as a tenant. The title role, played by Marie-Thérèse Fortin, will see her feminist fiber, rather latent, reactivate and push her to new reflections and implications. “I also wanted to thwart our perceptions of what a 55-year-old woman is,” explains Déraspe, who was commissioned by the French company O’Brother Company to write this text in order to offer a substantial and rich role to the actress Gisèle Torterolo, who was then that age. The troupe struggled to find such a pearl in the contemporary dramaturgical repertoire.
From Reims to Bic
The play was therefore staged in Reims and then in Paris, in 2021 and 2022. However, since then, the author says she has completely rewritten the text. Firstly so that the language would be adapted to the local idiom, but also because certain realities differ on either side of the ocean. There was in particular a scene, in the original version, which addressed the Polytechnique tragedy. The memory of having been shocked by this event, in her youth, rekindled Fanny’s activist flame. “I thought that in Quebec, it would have been very clumsy. […] I had to find another trigger for him to wake up.”
This catalyst will be a fourteenth femicide that occurred during the year, as well as Alice’s public statements on this subject. “Fanny wonders why it doesn’t matter to her that there are so many victims, why it becomes an anecdote that women die. I find that much more accurate, I think it speaks more to our world today.” Furthermore, in the French version, the heroine openly said she was not a feminist. “Here, a 60-year-old woman who says that… it’s hard to believe, I find.”
Déraspe has, moreover, noted a much more marked gap, in France, between the stance of men and that of women regarding feminism. “There were arguments during debates where men from the production team became very emotional when I said things about gender equality,” she says. “Guys who had commissioned and were producing a play on this subject had difficulty adhering to or even discussing these issues. It was something! Here, it’s a subject that we embrace together. The co-directors are also a man and a woman.” In this case, Hubert Lemire, artistic director of the Théâtre du Double signe, and Marie-Hélène Gendreau, his counterpart at the Théâtre du Bic, the Estrie and Bas-Laurentian institutions co-producing the show.
Me and the other
If the playwright felt empowered to orchestrate an encounter from which the three protagonists will emerge, each in their own way, shaken in their convictions and their daily lives but grown, it is notably because she claims a certain neutrality. “When I started writing the play, I was already beginning to be surprised by the words of younger activists, to be sometimes a little lost in all these discourses that were emerging. I am between these two generations, trying to understand them. My position is one of observation and real curiosity.”
It is also a position of the in-between — in addition to a good dose of humor and nuances — that would allow him to avoid the pitfalls of didacticism, moralization, even indictment, and to maintain his faith in the possible exchanges between individuals or groups with dissimilar cultures, referents, and values. “I have to believe in it, because it is part of my DNA. I grew up in the region, no one in my family is in the cultural or at least literary world. For me, it is a fight every Christmas, every vacation, to try to communicate with the people in my family, to try to understand each other. It is something that lives within me. I think it is a richness for me not to come from a literary background. I realize, more and more, that each of my pieces is a way of dialoguing with my origins.”