by AMY BARRATT

It was one of the best, and funniest new plays I’ve seen in nine years on this beat. Bye Bye Baby premiered at the Monument National in late 2004 in an Imago Theatre production directed by Clare Schapiro. Based on that production, Centaur’s Gordon McCall picked it up for his current “Montreal Stories” season. (“He called the next day,” says Shapiro). That remount opens tonight.

Shapiro had encouraged writer Elyse Gasco to adapt her 1999 collection of short stories, Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?, to the stage. The end product, which deals with one woman’s search for her birth mother, is less based on than inspired by the book.

“Really, the play begins where the book ends,” explains Gasco, who was adopted privately in the mid-’60s. Private adoptions, which were perfectly legal at the time, were arranged by a doctor with no social service involved and therefore very few records were kept.

For Gasco, a witty, self-effacing mother of two, the hardest part was writing the ending. “At some point [in a play] you have to make sense of it all,” she explains. “You have to say, ‘Okay, what lessons have we learned here? How can we tie this all up?’”

But Gasco resisted doing that in the play she describes as “sickeningly autobiographical,” simply because she had experienced no such closure in real life.

Autobiographical or not, the text is a unique blend of styles from kitchen sink realism to surreal humour in the service of a story about secrecy—both personal and institutional—and the harm it can do. “I have nothing against adoption,” Gasco stresses. “I have everything against secrecy.” The secrecy of parents who don’t tell their child she’s adopted; the secrecy of the state with its sealed records.

With one exception, the original cast has been reassembled for this remount, which Gasco describes as a “refined” version. “It’s basically the same show as before, but we also realized there was stuff that just didn’t work in the original production,” Gasco says. “Usually, a company like Imago gets to do a run of 12 shows or whatever and that’s it. We’ve been given this incredible opportunity to get up and try it again.”

In addition to the protagonist, Elle (Alison Darcy), her adoptive mother (Leni Parker) and a social worker (Felicia Shulman), the all-female cast includes a shadowy birth mother (Anita La Selva, taking over from Margie Gillis), and Elle’s alter-ego played by France Rolland.

The published text of Bye Bye Baby has just come out from J. Gordon Shillingford in the Scirocco drama imprint. Copies will be available for sale at the Centaur. Meanwhile, the play has been getting attention from as far away as Europe and as nearby as rue St-Denis. A prominent Quebec translator is set to do a French version of the script and a major Montreal company is said to be “interested.”

Damn Dammes

By an unfortunate coincidence (slip-up?), both major English theatres have openings tonight, April 27. The Segal presents My Old Lady, in collaboration with Compagnie Jean-Duceppe. Israel Horovitz’s play is about a New Yorker (Chip Chuipka) who inherits a chic Paris apartment and wants to sell it, but finds that a peculiar French law prevents him from doing so as long as two elderly tenants remain alive.

Horovitz is a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, notably for the 1999 film Sunshine, which traced a Hungarian Jewish family through the 20th century. This production, directed by Daniel Roussel and starring Beatrice Picard and Marthe Turgeon, will be presented in French next season at Duceppe. It runs to May 14 at the Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre of the SBC (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine), 739-7944.

Bye Bye Baby, to May 28 at Centaur (453 St-François-Xavier), 288-3161

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