“This text is like a big offering. It’s dizzying. Playing it takes courage. And I try to work that in myself. I tell myself this will make me stronger [rires]. The actress had never experienced the challenge of the monologue. She didn’t dream of it either, loving this “game of tennis” that is the exchange of lines with a partner. But “to say no would have been to give all the room to fear”, explains the one who confides generously, in her dressing room at the Prospero theater.
And Sophie Desmarais will never have carried a work within her for so long. She first performed an initial version of this creation by renowned French playwright Fabrice Melquiot at the exploratory event Territoires de parole, in 2019. The actress was supposed to give birth to this “beautiful text, which makes you travel” in January 2020. She can’t wait to finally share The One Dollar Story. “I have been living ever since with this immense text in my head, in my heart. You have to offer it there. I can’t stand being alone with this text anymore. He is addictive. But that also means I know him [bien]. So I have a lot of fun walking around there and trying things out. »
The interpreter was seduced by the language of Melquiot, with its poetic images, but also by its protagonist who is at the same time “impertinent, immodest, touching. Me, I often worked in subtlety, in a contained way. There, it is the total bursting. I haven’t done this for a long time. It’s an incredible playground, this text. It goes through an array of states, which is very interesting to build. It’s about a girl who summons ghosts into a mental space, and goes off into all sorts of memories. She [revisite] its history, in snippets, in flashes, through the senses. It’s a story, but very embodied, organic. »
Troubled by a revelation about her origins, Jodie sets out to find her truth, wanting to find out who her biological father is. For the actress, The One Dollar Story deals with universal themes: “Loss, betrayal, mourning, wandering… It’s a moving fable. Jodie will go far in pain, but also in her journey, which opens up to all kinds of things. This is what is strong with the play: it rubs shoulders with Greek tragedy, it seems that it sometimes leads to a tragic verticality. »
It is in action that Sophie Desmarais has memorized this piece described as ” road trip theatrical”, recording the score to listen to it during walks to put her baby to sleep. “I learned this text for months while walking. Looks like he was asking for movement. The story crosses a rather mythical America, nourished by artistic references, where Jodie would even be the daughter of Suzanne, the Montrealer who inspired Leonard Cohen’s cult song… Fabulation?
What interests Sophie Desmarais is rather the very lucid look that the protagonist has on this bohemian of the late 1960s and its aborted dreams. “There is something that ‘pushes her up’ in the utopias of that time. ‘Cause she’s a child of that, all undone, deconstructed. She rose on her own in the end. This absence of nostalgia about an often romanticized period offers “an interesting point of view, because we have seen the reverse a lot. »
Privacy
On this Quebec-France co-production, which she will present in Paris — a first for her — next winter, Sophie Desmarais had a happy meeting with Roland Auzet, the one who had previously edited In the loneliness of the cotton fields and Listen to our defeats, END at Prospero. “I like to explore new things, even if I’m scared. It takes me to a place where I have never been. »
The team had completed a successful first stage of work last year, on Zoom, due to the pandemic, with a view to performances, which were finally canceled: the director directed the actress, filmed by four cameras, and the designers from the hexagon. “It was madness! You can’t do theater remotely. It was really hard, especially with this very intense, very virtuoso text. To be accompanied in this way was horribly insecure. I felt like a little lab rat. But at the same time, we worked surprisingly well. »
Quoted in the press release, Auzet affirms that, for the interpreter, it is not a question of “playing Jodie, but of knowing where are the traces of Jodie in Sophie”. “I always work the roles in a different way, and for this text, I never thought about the character or how to achieve it, confirms Sophie Desmarais. I rather have the impression of being instrumentalized by the writing and that [produit] character. It passes through my body, my voice, I don’t have to transform myself. Jodie is colored with elements of me, but at the same time, it’s not me either. I really feel “at the service of”. She’s an actress, too. It’s interesting, because it comes to work on the real aspect of the performance: is it playing something? »
The actress will also have to evoke several other characters, without really playing them, over the monologue. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a musical concerto, which goes very quickly, which is very fleeting. “A work of vocal differentiation for which she benefits from the contribution of a microphone.
This device also allows the great privacy that the room needs. “Especially since I’m all alone in a large bare space, so I can’t lean on anything. It also makes the poetic flights of Melquiot work. Sometimes it feels like hypnosis. The text creates affects, sensations. »
exhilarating
Sophie Desmarais refused many offers (even auditions) to create The One Dollar Story. ” I only do this. She says she is out of breath from the hours when we shoot during the day and go on stage in the evening. “Maybe it’s COVID, or having had a child. I m 35 years old. I want to devote myself to one thing at a time, to concentrate. It makes the project more valuable. »
And for an actress who does not play there so often, she has a rich track record in the theater, marked by demanding choices, “which challenge me and transform me as a performer”. From Pelléas and Mélisande edited by Christian Lapointe at The Daisiesfor UBU, or A woman in Berlin with Brigitte Haentjens. “Theatre is so absorbing,” she explains. It is a total, absolute commitment. So I have to make sure that my heart, my mind and my body go to the same place. Otherwise, we can suffer, in the theater. But that didn’t happen to me. I am very careful. »
One thing is certain, with this new show, the actress, who has toured a lot in recent years, is living quite a journey. “There is something very exhilarating about the scene. The meeting with the public is a strange relationship: terror and pleasure rub shoulders, we go from one to the other quite quickly. But it’s above all about entering an area and getting carried away. I have no choice but to dive into it. Jumped up ! And you will see what happens. There is an experience of danger. For me, but, I think, also for the spectators. They are in the same game as me. »
This fear that the interpreter will fall. “Denis Marleau talks a lot about that: as soon as it becomes too comfortable, it no longer interests us. We like to see the tightrope walker, to see that the show plays with the limits of his abilities. Roland [Auzet] tries to take me towards this experience, the more performative side. There is a danger. We are really in an arena. That’s what I also love about theatre: it’s powerfully archaic. And it’s amazing that it still exists. »