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Hitting Marie over the head >> Acting enlivens Les Quatre morts de Marie by AMY BARRATT
Je vais mourir devant vous. Je vous en prie, regardez-moi, Envelopper-moi, soufflez sur moi. Je vais mourir devant vous. Je m'appelle Marie. Quatre fois! I often wonder just who these companies are hoping to attract with such pretentious drivel. Those lines--which Les Productions Branle-bas is using to advertise its Les Quatre Morts de Marie at Espace La Veillée--at best had me imagining an actress performing a series of operatic death scenes (which would have at least been amusing). At worst, I figured she'd go on talking about it for two hours and never just DIE. In view of the disdain in which theatre critics are currently being held in this city, I decided to lie low, buying my own ticket for Les Quatre Morts... and sneaking in to the performance without going through the company's publicist. (Evidently, the Espace La Veillée people don't read my reviews anyway. If they even glanced at the Mirror once in a while they'd know that my name isn't Mme. Barrette. Even so, they're in better shape than the at least half a dozen companies in town who think that someone named Emmy Barrets writes this column.) As you can probably tell, I was gearing up to hate this show before I'd even seen it. Then I went and, miracle of miracles, it wasn't half bad. The "je m'appelle Marie" speech turns out not to be the work of some flack but of playwright Carole Fréchette herself, in a monologue delivered by Marie at the very beginning of the play. Actress Suzanne Lemoine does the best she can with this awkward and unnecessary prologue (the title of the play is explanation and embarrassment enough) and then, mercifully, we move into territory that is engaging and actually dramatic. The bulk of the play consists of scenes showing Marie at different stages of her life. Except possibly for the last one, her four "deaths" seem to be emotional rather than physical, reminiscent of the Sylvia Plath poem "Lady Lazarus": I am only thirty. /And like the cat I have nine times to die./This is Number Three... Lemoine plays Marie first as a precocious 11-year-old, then an angry young radical and then as a desperate, love-starved New Age wingnut. Love starvation is one quality that unites all of the Maries, and each of her deaths harks back to her early abandonment by her parents. In the first scene, the mother, played by Sylvie Drapeau, leaves a faucet running when she disappears. Each subsequent death is both indicated and symbolized by running water. (The stage gets very wet in the course of this show, as does the lead actress and, I'd wager, some occupants of the front row.) Acting, particularly by the two women, is the saving grace of this production. Lemoine plays each of her incarnations with conviction and the hilarious Drapeau throws her whole body into her supporting roles. Martin Faucher's direction, following the pattern of Fréchette's writing, is fairly inconspicuous throughout, only falling into self-indulgence at the beginning and end. Les Quatre Morts de Marie wasn't painful to sit through, but neither was it ultimately very satisfying. >>> An open letter defending critic Gaëtan Charlebois against Centaur artistic director Gordon McCall's charge that he is "out of control in his behaviour toward theatre events in this community," has been sent to the media by the Association des critiques du théâtre du Québec. I personally decided against signing the letter, not because I disagree with it, but because I feel uncomfortable signing my name to something I didn't write, particularly something so ridiculously long and humourless. Here's hoping we all get over ourselves, and soon. Les Quatre Morts de Marie continues tonight through Saturday, 8pm & Sunday, 4pm at Espace La Veillée, 1371 Ontario E.
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Je m'appelle Marie