I like theatre. Some plays I have attended have literally overwhelmed me or moved me to tears.
I knew that I would never deprive myself of theater seeing the beauty Tit-Cockby Gratien Gélinas, staged by the Théâtre de la Bordée, in Quebec, in 1993. In 2006, in Joliette, the play Gagarin Way, by Scottish playwright Gregory Burke, carried by the disturbing intensity of David Boutin and Stéphane Jacques, embodying factory workers dispossessed of their work, capsized me by forcing me to wonder if the revolt against injustice was doomed to failure. In 2016, the distress of Guy Nadon, an old history teacher with Alzheimer’s in you will remember me, by François Archambault, marked me forever. The theater is powerful, it changes lives.
However, I don’t live in Montreal or Quebec and, as I get older, I’m less and less outgoing. Consequently, my opportunities to see good plays are rare since the theater that travels to the regions, with some exceptions, is essentially commercial in nature.
The pandemic, in this regard, has been good, by encouraging theaters to turn to webcasting and Télé-Québec to present a few plays. Of course, theater on screen may not be as powerful as live theatre, but it’s better than the almost nothing to which fans of the genre in the region are condemned. Quebec produces excellent theatre, but, in the current situation, the latter, for lack of distribution, remains reserved for the privileged. A national cultural policy worthy of the name should include, it seems to me, adequate funding for theatrical tours as well as support for webcasting and television broadcasting of good plays produced here. It’s not just TV series in life.
My favorite solution to satisfy my appetite for theater is therefore to read it. Each year, I reread, for pure pleasure, a few pieces by Molière and Marivaux to revel in this aerial language and this sublime rhythm. I often go back to Gratien Gélinas and Michel Tremblay. Theatrical news also guides my choices. When the Denise-Pelletier Theater presented The Salem Witchesby Arthur Miller, in November 2021, I read this masterpiece at home, before continuing with They were all my sons (1947), another excellent play by the brilliant American playwright. When you have seen a few plays live, when you have a certain sense of theatre, it is quite easy to bring the theater you read to life through your imagination.
Thanks to Leméac publisher, one of the few Quebec houses to publish contemporary theatre, I can discover current plays. In The weight of ants (2022, 88 pages), the playwright David Paquet gives life to two teenagers who find themselves, somewhat reluctantly, thrown into an election for the presidency of their school, which is very poorly ranked in the charts.
Jeanne embodies the youth revolted against advertising, against economic injustice, against the headlong rush of global warming. For her, the fire is on, and the only possible reaction is uncompromising anger. Olivier, he is inhabited by anxiety. In his nightmares, he sees the Earth as a “doom globe”. For him, however, the world is beautiful and deserves to be rescued. The adults around them sink into cowardly weariness and advocate willful blindness as a solution to childhood anxiety. The piece, which is aimed primarily at teenagers, is not exempt from complacency towards the “progressive” clichés of the day, but its lively rhythm somewhat compensates for this irritant.
“Young Professionals” take center stage in The art of living (2022, 104 pages), by Liliane Gougeon Moisan. The first half of the piece strikes true and strong. It illustrates, with a kind of benevolent irony, the distress of these young adults who are nevertheless privileged, but without an existential compass.
To fill their inner void, they fall back on the expedients promoted by the ambient therapeutic culture. One thinks she will be fine when she has found the ideal arrangement of her furniture, the other spiritualizes her relationship to food, the third seeks salvation through exercise and the last, who is not “well nowhere”, idealizes the life of his farmer grandfather. Sounds like a theatrical version of the song Degenerationsfrom the group Mes Aïeux, with a touch of subtlety.
In the second half of the play, however, the condo in which the four protagonists live collapses and the subject of the play falls apart. We vaguely understand that this generation suffers from a feeling of uselessness, would like to give meaning to their lives in order to be worthy of recognition. On the scene, however, at this stage, she is lost, and so are we.