Four women, two plays

>>Imago Theatre’s The Baroness and the
Pig and MainLine’s Short Story Long
put the focus on social experiments
and extramarital affairs

TAMING THE BEAST:
Leni Parker and Nathalie Claude

by NEIL BOYCE

Imago Theatre’s 20th season closer is a Montreal play (and later film) of some renown that, curiously, is only now getting an English-language debut in Quebec.

The setting for Michael Mackenzie’s The Baroness and the Pig is a 19th century Parisian mansion. Inspired by Rousseau’s idea of the enfant sauvage, a Baroness concocts a social experiment in educating a child raised in a pig barn to a productive life among the lower classes. It goes awry, as these things do, when her untamed protégé develops ideas of her own.

Emily “The Pig” is a juicy role for an actor as well versed in movement and physical theatre as Nathalie Claude (with Carbone 14 and Montreal Danse part of her lengthy résumé). She pours everything into it, frequently leaving the play in the dust with a wildly expressive performance. Claude is gross and charming as she grunts, rolls around, quacks like a duck and savagely humps the edge of a table. Mashing up her tutor’s rules on social decorum, she babbles, “Will that be all, Madame? Answer the door! May I ask who’s calling? She is not home!”

Nobody does haughtiness like actor Leni Parker, and her patrician looks serve the part of the Baroness well, even though the role often defaults to that of exasperated straight-man to Emily’s antics. There are lovely moments as her stiff character breaks, revealing a dreary life spent with her husband, the unseen Admiral.

But all told, the piece feels remote under Catherine Bourgeois’s direction—the big, empty set and stark lighting don’t help—and one longs for a little something to make it come alive.

Tale of deception

Joel Fishbane first wrote Short Story Long as, yes, a short story, later adapting it to the stage as something he said actors could “really sink their teeth into.” And a toothsome morsel it is.

Fishbane directs this two-woman, one-act tale of secrecy at the MainLine with Stefanie Buxton and Stéphanie Breton as adversaries. Buxton plays Julianne Kennedy, grieving the death of her writer-husband Lincoln, stunned when she discovers the will bequeaths his work to the mysterious A.K., a name known only to the executor.

Enter Amalthea King, played by Breton, who might have been Lincoln’s mistress and may know the meaning of his final wishes.

Amalthea tries to explain why Lincoln never mentioned her, saying, “I’m sure he meant to tell you,” but Julianne shuts her up: “Maybe one day I’ll have a séance and find out.”

The actors step in and out of scenes with fluidity, jumping from present to past through monologues.

“People love stories they’ve already heard,” says Julianne. And Fishbane’s sharp, epigrammatic text might have come off too clever were it not for Buxton’s intelligent and nuanced performance. Though she’s at first the nerdy-girl to Amalthea’s Barbie, both characters fill out, and the bittersweet ending hits the right note.

Late Mention: Kudos to SideMart Theatrical Grocery and Messrs. Shaver and Cuthbertson for Haunted Hillbilly: The Hyram Woodside Atrocity—a deranged musical that blows the doors off the mother, and the best show I’ve seen in years.

The Baroness and The Pig, to
May 18 at Théâtre La Chapelle
(3700 St-Dominique), (514) 843-7738,
billetterie@lachapelle.org
Short Story Long, to May 17
at MainLine Theatre (3997
St-Laurent), (514) 884-4425,
www.pumpkintheatre.ca