At the hardware store where I worked as a teenager, there was a colleague nicknamed Sex in the lumberyard. Everyone called him that. No idea why. I believe his real name was Réjean. He was around 35 years old. One day, he accidentally cut his leg with an ax and we didn’t see him for months.
I thought about Sex when I saw the play Foreman by Charles Fournier, this week at the Théâtre Denise-Pelletier. Fournier worked for eight years on construction sites before reorienting himself towards the theater. He met some forty men, of all ages, in order to question them on masculinity and to feed his reflection and the writing of his play, named “work of the year in the Capitale-Nationale” in 2019.
“There are some who were raised by wolves. Me, I was raised by monuncles ”, says straight away the character he plays on stage, Étienne Bouchard, alias Carlos. Carlos doesn’t remember why he was nicknamed that. Nicknames are often born out of context.
Charles Fournier drew on his interviews and his own experience to create Foreman, the story of a bunch of buddies, five construction guys in their twenties, who meet for the weekend on a woodlot, following an unfortunate event. Not necessarily to remake the world, but to take stock of their friendship, their lives, and women. Going over the past, which gangs of old people invariably do buddies, embellishing the present and not thinking too much about the future.
They call each other by their nicknames (Frank and Joe), by the generic Gros or by their surname (Poitras), another Quebec classic. There is the player, specialist in Tinder looking like a candidateOD with his cap upside down, his shake protein and his obsession with muscle mass. There is the recalcitrant, as a couple, who is criticized for being a soft flank in front of his Germaine. There is the little one potty, lover of life-size role-playing games. There is the big impassive slobber, above everyone, but perhaps less courageous than he looks.
Then there is Carlos, who reveals in his intimate monologues how he was hardened from an early age by his father, with masculinist prejudices and slaps on the face.
Reunited, they happily get drunk, smoke joints and eat hot dogs. They call each other “fif” and “fagot” in a homophobic virility contest heavy with innuendo.
They are constantly on a razor’s edge between confidence, the Four Truths, and the threat of everything erupting into open and irreconcilable conflict.
Foreman is a staging of the distress of the angry young white man – the one who elected Trump to the presidency of the United States and who supports the far-right movements in Quebec -, coupled with a guide to toxic masculinity available in all its forms.
In chorus, the construction guys pose at the foreman, their boss, a slew of questions that sound like taken from a hypothetical macho manual titled A man, a real man. Question: “How many girls do you sleep with a man? “Answer:” We start counting to ten “…
They are, unfortunately, credible characters, who speak a real language, made up of silences that punctuate unfinished sentences. They represent archetypes of ordinary working class guys, who talk to each other frankly, without filter or decorum, about anything but their true feelings.
They have learned the hard way, through humiliation, not to be vulnerable. “When I was 11, I became a man,” says Carlos. That is to say, he understood that in order to gain respect, and to make his father proud, he had to become a threat to others. A little suburban boss in the making, who will end up hitting a wall, losing everything, his job, his home, his girlfriend and his dignity. Everything except his anger, which in other circumstances could have pushed him to commit the inexplicable and the irreparable.
This anger, against women, against immigrants, against well-off English speakers, I could not guess the outlines of it before working in this lumber yard from my 16 to 19 years old. The internet, it must be said, did not exist at the time.
I have heard colleagues, who are also very nice, with whom I got along very well, speak terribly sexist or contemptuous of women, display their anti-Semitic and xenophobic prejudices aloud, or even refuse to serve clients, because they were recent immigrants who did not speak French or wore ostentatious religious symbols.
I came to understand that it is the fear of the unknown, the ignorance of certain realities, the stubborn stereotypes that provoke these universal defense mechanisms. Our experiences forge us, the beautiful as well as the less beautiful. They allow us to develop empathy. For those who have been raised by wolves, as for those who have been raised by monuncles.