Local love and lore

>> Rebecca Harper brings ’70s Montreal
poet Ken Norris’s One Night to life

SHADOWS AND NIGHT: Eric Hausknost

by Amy Barratt

It’s the kind of story that makes you pine for a St-Laurent Boulevard that is even now slipping from our grasp. On a break from rehearsing a show at MainLine Theatre last spring, Rebecca Harper wandered into S.W. Welch Booksellers and picked up a slim volume of poetry by Montrealer Ken Norris. The book was One Night, a long poem about a woman that got away. The bookstore, as of this month, has also flown the neighbourhood, the latest victim of rising rents and endless construction on the historic street.

Harper didn’t know anything about Norris at the time, but she bought the book. “On the way home, I began reading it,” she says, “and as I read, I saw all this action, all this imagery. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to do something about this!’”

She had already been approached by Tableau D’Hôte to direct a different show for them, and had said yes. But her enthusiasm for One Night was so strong that she went to artistic directors Mat Perron and Mike Payette and proposed doing it instead. The project was a perfect fit with the company’s twin mandates: to produce only Canadian works, and to encourage new work from emerging artists.

Harper has been working and living with the material since last spring, and tonight, the fruit of her—and many other peoples’—labours will take the stage at the Studio Hydro Québec of the Monument National. Harper’s adaptation of the poem, also titled One Night, is a dance-theatre piece performed by a male actor and a female dancer. They represent by turns the lover and the beloved, the writer and the reader.

Familiarity with the poem, or with Norris’s work in general, is not necessary to an understanding of the theatre piece, according to Harper, firstly because the poem has a story. “It’s about a writer trying to seduce the reader. When you read the poem, there is obviously a woman that haunts him.” Secondly, as one of the Vehicule poets of the 1970s, Norris’s work is firmly based in Montreal culture, and that should make it accessible to a local audience. The piece is performed by Eric Hausknost and Véronique Gaudreau.

More CanCon

This weekend, Teesri Duniya is presenting two staged readings of Canadian plays under its Fireworks banner. Michael Redhill’s Goodness, about an Alzheimer’s patient on trial for war crimes, is first up on Saturday in the Balustrade space of the Monument National. This Toronto poet, playwright and novelist is the author of the wonderful Martin Sloane, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize. I haven’t had a chance to read his latest novel, Consolation, but am told it’s even better than the first.

The series continues on Sunday afternoon with Burning In, by Saskatchewan playwright Natalie Meisner. It’s about a Canadian correspondent who finds herself becoming part of the story while covering war in Lebanon. The readings are directed by Emma Tibaldo and Sarah Stanley, respectively.

One Night, March 29–April 7, 8:30 p.m.,
at Studio Hydro Québec of the Monument National.
2 p.m. matinees March 31 and April 7, $15–$20,
(514) 915-9297

Goodness, Saturday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m.;
Burning In, Sunday April 1 at 2:30 p.m., both at
La Balustrade, Monument National, $10,
(514) 848-0238