When a very curvy woman, initially short, runs like a hamster on a rolling track while screaming like someone lost, it obviously impresses. When her name is Debbie Lynch-White, even more so. Because the interpreter of La Bolduc infuses each of his roles with his incredible energy. Especially here, propelled alone on stage at Espace Go without respite in this aptly named Tremors. We truly tremble for the performer given to this test of endurance, as for the broken humanity portrayed by her voice. The imprecations of revolt from a nurse for Doctors Without Borders in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then on a boat collecting migrants in the Mediterranean, are delivered by a bulldozer. Enough to make the viewer want to protest: “Spare us!” Spare her! » But the sails are torn mercilessly. And the actress continues her thorny journey armed with unfailing determination. We will come out of it shocked. She, exhausted.
The show does not flatter the right conscience in the right direction. There is no question of portraying angelic figures of compassion within NGOs. Mission leaders negotiate with bloodthirsty warlords to prevent them from shooting at their cars in exchange for medical care. Raped women treated in their clinics can lose their lives upon returning to the village for having denounced the attackers. Should we welcome them despite everything? Caregivers under pressure do not often give each other gifts. To risk it – like aborting a sister in a country where this practice is prohibited – is to see heavy sanctions rain down on you. Our nurse runs or collapses between questioning, shattered dreams and drunken parties under threatening skies. At Espace Go, spectators experience electroshock after electroshock.
Today, the public needs to explore behind the scenes of great tragedies without guardrails. Thus, the TNM presents Polytechnic Project, by Marie-Joanne Boucher and Jean-Marc Dalphond, documentary theater piece on the atrocious feminicides of December 6, 1989. A fascinating project but a work with a cluttered plot that struggles to upset. On stage these days, the impression of naked and raw truth is revealed more vividly in the face of this Tremors-there. Question of striking force.
Toronto theater man Christopher Morris, director of the company Human Cargo, wrote this explosive text after Doctors Without Borders allowed him to follow on a mission and interview nurse Liza Courtois, the character’s model. On stage, the lady is out of the ordinary, queer, sexually very liberated, overweight, outspoken and with a rage to wake the dead. She asks herself questions without ever sparing herself. How to help the most deprived on Earth? Can we really be useful? Should we leave our post, our friends, our loves in battle?
It’s hard for this woman to remain calm when injustice looms at every turn, when good turns into evil and evil into good, when human life hangs by a thread, quickly cut before your eyes. It is dangerous to see the horror up close. Red vestibule with post-traumatic shocks. How can we believe in human beings after having seen them descend to the lowest level of their psyche to commit the worst?
Tremors is translated by Maxime Allen and directed by Édith Patenaude. Debbie Lynch-White propels the room like a cannonball, screaming her frustration at the absurdity of the world. The public must take off their rose-colored glasses. However, you don’t need to be an employee or volunteer of a humanitarian organization to have sensed this: to get things done is first of all to sacrifice one’s illusions about one’s own spotless goodness. Then plunge your hands into the dirt with the hope of being useful if the opportunity arises. NGOs are essential charitable organizations that mobilize imperfect beings like everywhere else. This piece reminds us of it at every moment.
At the theatre, the loud cries of the performer awaken the stunned, desensitized minds of the spectators by imposing on them the shock of reality. Tremors refers to African clan wars, the crisis of migrants saved or not by helping hands. And here is now the piece associated in spite of itself with the deadly conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Doctors Without Borders clinicians lost their lives in Gaza earlier this week. These images are projected onto the “ one woman show » incendiary. The rumblings of the stage seem to emerge from the crushed bodies on TV. We run to Tremors to learn how to share them.