Walk of strife

>> Playwright David Fennario's walking tour of Old Montreal looks at history from the bottom up

by MARK SLUTSKY

"I had a couple of Westmount ladies walk out on me," says Montreal playwright turned tour-guide David Fennario. "I guess I can't blame them, you know? There's only so much you can take." Now in its second year, Fennario's stridently left-wing walking tour, Mysteries of Montreal: A Hidden History of Canada, focuses on the kind of history most often left untouched by textbooks--and, as might be expected, Fennario doesn't shy away from attacking such touchy subjects as the Church, the Westmount ruling class and beloved university founder James McGill.

Fennario, who made his name with plays like On the Job and Balconville, originally produced the work that would become the tour as Gargoyles, a staged lecture and slide-show. In its current form, it's necessarily more concise, but as he says, "The fun part is you're actually there with them. You're in with the audience, and it's immediate."

Beginning his tour at Place d'Armes by the foot of the de Maisonneuve statue, Fennario immediately lets the audience know what to expect: "You got the Westmount version of our history, from the top down. But now I'm going to tell you the Verdun/Pointe St-Charles version of the same history, from the bottom up. It's amazing how history changes when you look at it from the point of view of the losers rather than the winners. All of the sudden good guys look like bad guys."

It's easy to see how this might not sit well with some people. Fennario won't gloss over the unpleasant facts of Canada's genesis--like de Maisonneuve's legacy of "intolerance, ignorance and territorial aggression hidden behind a pretty face," or the thousands of dead Irish workers piled into unmarked mass graves. Take his telling of the history of wealthy Westmount: he describes General Amherst leading 16,000 British troops into Montreal and adds, "Following along behind the British troops, like scavenger fish after a shark, was a rag-tag bunch of merchants, peddlers, short-change artists and swindlers, who are the predecessors--in some case, direct ancestors--of some of the richest, most powerful families in Westmount today."

One of the most interesting revelations in the tour comes after Fennario finishes eviscerating James McGill ("A slave owner who made a fortune ripping of the native peoples") and leads the small audience to a nondescript doorway on St-Jacques. Here stood the Ottawa Hotel, where "it was said that the best mint julep north of the Mason-Dixon line could be had." During the Civil War, Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth frequently met here with his co-conspirators who, according to Fennario, were backed by "the junior business partners up in Westmount, who happened to have a lot of money invested in sugar--Redpath Sugar; tobacco--MacDonald's Tobacco; flour--Ogilvy flour; and cotton--Dominion Textile." Who knew Montreal was such a hotbed of Confederate activity?

Fennario then leads the group westward, towards the outer edges of what was once the heavily Irish Griffintown. He then proceeds to smash another idol, Thomas D'Arcy McGee (whom he sees as a turncoat and squealer), and erect his own: tavern-owner and working-class philanthropist Joe Beef, who fed hundreds of starving canal workers so they could continue to strike for better conditions. Fittingly, for a Fennario hero, "he's got no statues, no schools and no streets named after him--just a tavern."

Mysteries of Montreal meets in Place d'Armes Saturdays and Sundays at 1pm, $15, until Sept. 2