This play, which also opens with a birth, has been in the making in the bowels of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) for several years. To say that the result lives up to expectations is an understatement. In a room at Sainte-Justine Hospital in 1979, the mother, daughter and granddaughter meet. The one who has just seen the light of day is the author, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, known as “the woman who searches”. The one who resurfaces, 27 years after having escaped, leaving her daughter, Mousse, “balanced on her 3 years”, is Suzanne, her grandmother, known as “the woman who flees”. “There is you. And between you two: me. Is it she who holds me out to you or you who stretch your empty arms towards me? I plunge my newborn gaze into yours.”
Let’s not beat around the bush: the show orchestrated by Alexia Bürger, her first at the TNM, is of astonishing beauty. With Sarah Berthiaume’s text, a score that unfolds Barbeau-Lavalette’s story without distorting it, which proceeds with an impressive distribution of speech without breaking with the narrative character of the raw material, the director gives birth to a living tableau, a pictorial work that constantly reconfigures itself before our astonished eyes. The scenographer Simon Guilbault has imagined bleachers of immaculate whiteness, those of a temple, a parliament or a theater, around which he has placed a frame. When the curtain rises on this dizzying space, this grand staircase that seems suspended above the void, this oversized booth within which the performers come and go like prodigious tightrope walkers, we hold our breath.
While Martin Labrecque’s lighting carefully applies shadows and lights, magnificently sculpting the space, the director draws on this canvas using the bodies of the performers, dressed soberly by Julie Charland. On her palette, there are also Julie Measroch’s accessories: umbrellas and animal skins, straps and ropes, not to mention many brightly colored stuffed animals. By preserving with such jealous care the meaning and aesthetics, by using the music of Philippe Brault and Frannie Holder sparingly, Alexia Bürger gives birth to paintings that express exaltation with as much accuracy as tragedy.
From 1926 to 2009, from Ontario to Quebec via Europe and the United States, Suzanne Meloche’s life is made up of exiles and battles, culture and agriculture, poetry and painting, carnal passions and intellectual commitments. While being personal, individual, intimate and familial, the subject matter of this show — the book, published by Marchand de feuilles, earned its author the Prix littéraire France-Québec and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal — is a hymn to the Quiet Revolution, to the emancipation of women, to the liberation of morals, to the valorization of the arts and knowledge. Building bridges between the Quebec of Global refusal and today’s, this creation absolutely had to take place on the stage of the TNM, where Lorraine Pintal, outgoing artistic director, has been able to shine for 32 years words as modern as those of Claude Gauvreau and Réjean Ducharme.
People’s Assembly
In the role of the narrator, crucial while being thankless, since always on the fringes of the action, Catherine De Léan is inhabited by an admirable determination. Coryphean of an ensemble of 17 voices, 17 bodies, among which those of three fabulous dancers, David Albert-Toth, Jacques Poulin-Denis and Anne Thériault, the luminous actress is at the head of a popular assembly, a choir of citizens who have come to relate here and now the tragic story of a lineage of exhilarating women.
Thus, Suzanne Meloche’s words resonate in the bodies of six exceptional actresses: Justine Grégoire (alternating with Agathe Ledoux), Anna Sanchez, Zoé Tremblay-Bianco, Éveline Gélinas, Marie-France Lambert and Louise Laprade. Faced with such attribution of speech, such judicious positioning in space, such fertile choral quality of words and sounds, voices and noises, we think of The crossing of the centuryorchestrated by Alice Ronfard based on the writings of Michel Tremblay, but also, of course, on Daughters of the Saint-Laurentby Rébecca Déraspe, a show staged by Bürger last year at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui and featuring the same rich and extraordinarily coherent vocabulary.
The cast members do not personify the protagonists, they carry their voices, ensuring that their stories span the ages. Thus, it is not uncommon for women to play men, for young people to play old people, for black people to play white people, for more than one actress to share the same character… A snub to a certain bourgeois theater, the fruit of an awareness undoubtedly fueled by the debates surrounding the shows SLAV And Kanatathis “colorblind” distribution on the TNM stage is what is commonly called a happy event, one of those that allows us to hope for a joyfully inclusive future for Quebec and its theatre.