by AMY BARRATT

Always a prolific playwright, lately it seems as if Michel Tremblay is ready and willing to bang out a play for the asking. His latest dramatic feat, if Tremblay himself is to be believed, was written in response to Quat'Sous artistic director Wajdi Mouawad's desire to hear from Claude and Alex, the father and son from Tremblay's Le Vrai Monde?

Impératif Présent, currently playing at Quat'Sous, takes up with the characters some 30 years after the climactic moment in Le Vrai Monde? when father Alex burned the only copy of his son's first play (kids: this was in the days before computers).

The big question surrounding this premiere was what would Tremblay do with form? In Le Vrai Monde? each of the members of Claude's family has a double on stage who is that person as Claude has recreated him or her in his manuscript. But as only two actors - Jacques Godin and Robert Lalonde - had been cast in the new show, that concept would obviously not be repeated. What surprises did the master have in store?

At first, and indeed for the first hour or so, the play - set not just in a nursing home but in the bathroom of a nursing home - seems bleakly realistic.

Claude has come, as he does a couple of times a week, to bathe and shave his invalid father. Alex's illness is described as aphasia. He is in a wheelchair, apparently catatonic, and no one knows if he can understand what is being said to him.

For some reason never explained, Claude, who has gone on to become a successful playwright, has chosen this day to have it out with his father. In a conveniently uninterrupted monologue, he describes just how much he hates the old man and why, admitting along the way that that hate is his "motor," the thing that propels him to write.

There is some jolly good Tremblay writing in this speech, but it's close to pure exposition and so fundamentally undramatic. Actor Lalonde is for the most part only adequate and, in the several spots where the text calls for him to cry, is utterly unconvincing.

Things pick up somewhat in the second act, which is performed in this production without a break for intermission. A projected title reads, "The same day," and when the lights come up we're in the same grey bathroom, but the roles have been reversed. Claude is the invalid in the wheelchair and it is his elderly father who literally has the stage. In his monologue, Alex echoes many of his son's thoughts, but displays his own far-less-sensitive personality. The irony is that, as played by Godin, Alex has more of a sense of humour than his son and therefore (even though we know he probably is the monster Claude says he is) he comes across as more attractive than the son.

Impératif Présent is interesting as an exercise, but the "plot twist" comes too late in the game for an audience that is nearly catatonic itself by the end of the first act.

Also of note on stages this week, the latest creation by Les Éternels Pigistes, Mille feuilles is currently playing at Théâtre D'Aujourd'hui. And in that theatre's small salle Jean-Claude Germain, the winner of the Best New Text award at the 2001 Fringe gets a remount. La Voix du sang runs to Nov. 15. To reserve for both shows, call 282-3900.

Impératif Présent continues to Nov. 22 at Théâtre de Quat'sous (100 des Pins E.), 845-7277

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