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Colourless casting >> African play goes off-track at La Licorne by AMY BARRATT
I'm happy to report that she soon thought better of this scheme, and the show never went on. Similar good sense failed to prevail upon director Martin Faucher; his production of Chadian playwright Koulsy Lamko's Tout bas... si bas recently opened at La Licorne. The text was clearly written with old-stock African, not old-stock Québécois, actors in mind, but Faucher's production sports the lily-white complexions of locals Patrice Coquereau, Muriel Dutil, Luc Morissette and others. Faucher's motivations were apparently similar to those of the acquaintance mentioned above: he had fallen in love with the text and wanted to work on it with actors he knew and felt comfortable with. It must be said, in the young but already accomplished director's defence, that the playwright himself seems to have no problem with white actors speaking his words. "My heart is with you in this adventure," Lamko has written to Faucher. And indeed, if we truly support the idea of colour-blind casting, we should support this experiment wholeheartedly--shouldn't we? One of the reasons I went to see this Tout bas... si bas was to find out if it would work. Though it isn't 100 per cent successful, it could have been much, much worse. The production has several things going for it. That the text is not particularly realistic certainly helps. Though it's set in Africa, the locale, like the plot, has a mythical feel. Then there's the sincere desire of everyone involved to make it work. In everything from the program notes to the double (unnecessary) curtain call, you can sense the excitement the entire company feels at being involved in this production. That's partly because, according to the publicity, this is the first time a text from francophone Africa has been produced in Montreal. (Perhaps my enthusiasm is damper than theirs, having seen the occasional African play--with black actors!--on the English side). The versatile black box of La Licorne has been set up with spectators sitting length-wise on both sides of the space, with the playing area in between. Raymond Marius Boucher's set consists mainly of a sand-covered floor and a gnarled tree covered in bright red leaves. There Morissette, as the father, sits like a god grown impatient with the world, refusing to come down. In order to bring him down, Valerie Blais, as the young girl, concocts a story: the 75-year-old grandmother has given birth to a baby. A reporter (the always captivating Coquereau) gets wind of this "miraculous" event in a squatter's camp and quickly spreads the word. In quick succession, an army officer, a Catholic bishop, a Muslim imam and the mayor of the district all show up prepared to take credit for the child. Dutil is hilarious as the smiling, flirting (with everything) mayor. It is with Gérald Gagnon's imam, in dark foundation to make him look Arab, that the idea of colour-blind casting hits a pothole. It virtually skids off the road when the young girl picks up some dolls, which have been brought as gifts for the "baby," and has to decide between a brown- or pink-skinned one. How can you say you're ignoring race and then accentuate it, and how can you ignore race in a play that is in part about race? Given the self-perpetuating whiteness of the local theatre scene, it's possible that Faucher couldn't have found seven black francophone actors. But I know he could have found two or three with very little difficulty. With the shortage of work for actors of colour that already exists in this city, it's hard to justify this simple flip-flop as colour-blind casting. Tout bas... si bas runs until November 7 at La Licorne, 4559 Papineau. 523-2246
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I once knew a woman who dreamed of doing Ain't Misbehavin'--the Fats Waller musical revue--with an all-white cast. Her reasons, as far as I can recall, were: 1) she liked the show and 2) she wanted to work with a group of her friends (all white).