MONUMENTAL PRODUCTION
Play sheds light on possibilities of reconciliation,
“I have to direct this play.”
This was Jani Lauzon’s reaction when Nina Lee Aquino, artistic director of Factory Theatre, suggested she consider directing Colleen Wagner’s 1995 play The Monument in Factory’s 2017-18 season.
The Monument is a searing drama that stages the encounter between a young soldier convicted of war crimes and a woman who offers to save him in exchange for his total servitude. Questions of vengeance, retribution, cycles of violence and the possibility of forgiveness play out.
A story of this seriousness had not really been on Lauzon’s mind – she was actually hoping to direct a comedy – but the relevance of the play in today’s Canada struck her immediately.
“There are many intersections that could have been possible, but the most obvious one is murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. It’s really the core issue of what the play is about and what we’re dealing with in this country,” says Lauzon, who is Métis, and an acclaimed and awardwinning actor, writer, musician and puppeteer as well as director.
In this interpretation, the female character Mejra (played by Tamara Podemski, who is of Ojibway and Israeli heritage) is an Indigenous mother looking for answers about her missing daughter, and Stetko (Augusto Bitter) is in a gang rather than a member of the military.
The fact that the Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine verdicts came down in the first weeks of rehearsal was “uncanny,” says Lauzon, saying these are only the most recent cases of in which alleged perpetrators of crime against Indigenous people in Canada have been acquitted. “It’s just this repetition and these are only the cases that make it to court . . . there are so many others that don’t even get this far.”
This context has informed the creative process. “We start the day in ceremony,” says Lauzon. “We smudge and we talk together, because these things are influencing the decisions that we’re making in the rehearsal room. The world outside is in direct relationship to the work that is happening in the room and we’re all affected by it. It informs it a lot.”
The fact that Bitter is Venezuelan-Canadian adds another layer of complexity, says Lauzon, underlining that “reconciliation in his country is not just a white/Native relationship.”
Wagner’s original impetus to write the play were travels in Southeast Asia in the early 1990s, where she was witness to considerable civil unrest. Via communications from Quaker peacekeeping groups, Wagner started hearing about the mid-1990s Balkan wars and, in particular, how the rape and murder of women was being used as a war tactic. Though she still did not have a clear intention to write about the subject, “Stetko started to speak,” she says.
Richard Rose’s original 1995 staging, a co-production between Necessary Angel, Canadian Stage and the Manitoba Theatre Centre, was not a success with Toronto critics, Wagner recalls. “It was my first professional production and the critics were outraged. How dare I, what does this have to do with Canada, this revenge play. … I thought I was finished.”
Redemption started to arrive a year later when the play won the Governor General’s Award for English-language drama. An invitation from Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal to translate the play into French led to its 2001 Québécois premiere at Théâtre la Licorne. Around the same time it was translated into Mandarin and produced in China.
It has since been translated into a dozen languages and produced around the world, frequently in the context of civil war. A production by Isoko Theatre Company from Rwanda, directed by Canadian Jennifer Capraru, played at Harbourfront in 2001; and the play has been produced in professional, amateur and university contexts over the past 10 years in Sudbury, Halifax, Calgary, Guelph, London, Ont., and Vernon, B.C.
The lens through which those first critics in 1995 saw the piece has since “shifted,” says Wagner. “Plays don’t have to be Toronto-centric to speak to audiences . . . we are much more sophisticated now, much more aware.”
It’s a sad fact that the play still makes sense in any number of settings. “It’s a play about two human beings in a particular situation who have to find their way through it, in the context of war, and we never seem to have a shortage of those,” says Wagner.
“Sadly, it’s still quite relevant,” agrees Aquino. “Even if we were living in a utopia there are still lessons to be learned.”
For Lauzon, the goal of this production is that it “changes minds” about what the realities of truth and reconciliation look like.
“I hope that what we walk away with is the understanding that if we are committed to reconciliation, that it could get ugly. It could get violent. It could be loving. It could be revolutionary, but it will be all of those things together . . . It will require both sides to be engaged on that level and to recognize that those are the possibilities.” The Monument plays at Factory Theatre from March 15 to April 1. See factorytheatre.ca or call 416-504-9971.
Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.