“It’s a crisis unit”, says Gabrielle Lessard about The injury, his new play. Three years later HEREwhere she explored her relationship with Radio-Canada, the creator is back at Espace libre with a dramatic comedy in which the romantic, friendly and family ties of a group of women are seriously tested by illness, but more so by the devastating eco-anxiety of the main character.
“I’m always looking for the perfect blend of documentary and poetry, explains the author and director. Still, this time, I wanted to get involved in a more personal way, to venture into more intimate territories. I suffer from eco-anxiety, I am the mother of a young child, I take a lot of individual responsibilities and I moralize those around me. “Let’s just say that the similarities between the designer and her heroine are hard to ignore: “Usually, I consult tons of books before writing. This time I didn’t need to because everything the play depicts was already inside me. »
Legendary Lucidity
In her early thirties, Anne (Marie-Anick Blais) is an investigative journalist. She always seems to have the weight of the world on her shoulders. As enraged as it is terrified, committed as it is terrifying, she pours out her anxieties on her partner Josiane (Ève Duranceau), her sister Chloé (Lamia Benhacine), her friend Béa (Catherine Bouliane) and her mother Manon (Monique Spaziani). “Anne, explains the one who imagined it, it’s a T. rex who escapes from his enclosure because there is a power outage at Jurassic Park. Around her, no one dares to move, everyone holds their breath, but she will end up eating them all the same, as much as they are. »
“Anne, still claiming, says her friend Béa. Anne, always going for it without ever doing anything halfway. » When she is told that she has breast cancer, Anne reacts with her legendary lucidity and decides not to undergo treatment. “I’m going to take care of myself,” she explains. But not by being screwed by the same rotten system that made me sick. Mother of a little girl, she even comes to regret raising a child in this crazy world.
Anne makes a disturbing choice, not to say subversive. It adopts a political position, a critical posture which can sometimes even evoke that of certain conspiracy theorists. “She’s a leftist conspiracy maker,” Lessard doesn’t hesitate to say. I wrote the play before the pandemic, but I’m sure Anne would oppose vaccines, just as she opposes chemotherapy. Anne: “The cancer market is highly lucrative for pharmaceuticals. Alternative solutions exist, but they don’t line anyone’s pockets. It’s just not encrypted yet. But scientists all over the world are beginning to speak out. »
Revealing debates
What particularly fascinates Gabrielle Lessard are the polarized debates surrounding the state of the planet: “There is leakage, denial, misinformation and bad faith, but also anxiety , guilt, despair, and even a kind of fatalism. It’s disturbing to see how much we fail to agree, how unable we are to come together around an issue that is nevertheless universal, one of the rare situations that affects all human beings, against which no one is immune. »
The wall, the one we are supposedly about to hit, the designer thinks we have already hit it and that, like some of the characters in Don’t Look Up (Denial cosmic), the film by Adam McKay, we simply refuse to recognize it. These debates on ecology reveal social and intergenerational divisions that it is crucial to thwart, disparities that are at the heart of the play. “We are witnessing the collapse of a house of cards, explains the designer, the vanishing of an illusion, the fall of a system of thought. The arrival of cancer in the lives of these five women is what allows seemingly solid structures to shatter. »
When the possibility of the death of someone you love arises, what is it like to be a manager in an advertising company, a lawyer for a firm specializing in commerce or even a popular blogger? It is this shock that the piece allows us to observe, in a constant oscillation between laughter and tears. “We see them losing their grip, describes Gabrielle Lessard, losing control, entering their vulnerability despite themselves, and that’s where it gets really interesting. »
Soon a piece on Judy Chicago