Quebec ’60s play still manages to resonate today
Passage of time hasn’t lessened impact of Tremblay’s chronicle of Quiet Revolution
Michel Tremblay's La Bell es-so eu rs premiered in Quebec in 1968. That same year Celine Dion was born the youngest of 14 chil-dren. Until the 1960s. Quebec had the western world' s highest birth-rate. Within a generation it would have the lowest. and its strict Ca-tholicism would give way to an intense secularism. This was the Quiet Revolution. Revolutionary but rarely qui-et. its Bell es-so eur sport rayed 1 Sea st-end Montreal women ex-pressing their anger. confusion and frustration s loud ly. rudely. raucously. Their problem isn't too many children but too little personal power and joy. They yell and backbite. bitch and dream. stop everything for prayer then laugh uproariously at a joke about a raped nun.
Chronicling a culture under-going rapid. wrenching change. Tremblay also intended the play asap ar able abott politically emas-culated Quebec struggling to find its voice. Performed in English in Western Canada SO rears later. it resonates in alternate ways but remains badly theatrical. antes a story about enraged women lack-ing empowerment. all too relevant today.
Diane Brown' s scathing. very funny and imaginative Ruby Slip-pers Theatre production features strong performances from a won-derful ensemble of women experi-encing a differ en tic ind of # Me Too consciousness, Back before Air Miles. shoppers received bonus stamps with each supermarket purchase. You'd paste them into booklets to redeem them for household products. Germaine Lauzon (France Perras) has won a million stamps ina contest. She Unit es her daughter Linda( Pippa Mackie). sisters and neighbours into her kitchen to help paste them.
French for sisters-in-law .' les bell es-soeur "also suggests beau-tiful sisters. But little is beautiful or sister ly about this bunch. Ger-maine obnoxiously flaunts her good fortune and the others don th id ethe ire my or resentment. One by one. glaring at Germaine. they
intone, "Do I look like someone who's ever won anything?" Soon they're stuffing stamps into their purses. Me too, indeed.
They include angry sister Rose (Beatrice Zeilinger), bitter neighbour Marie-Ange (Lucia Frangione) and nasty Mme Du-buc (Sarah May Redmond), who smacks around her ancient wheel-chair-bound mother-in-law. Gen-tle Yvette (Melissa Oei), lovelorn Mlle Verrette (Eileen Barrett) and stuck-up Lisette de Courval (Sarah Rodgers) provide contrast but prove no less prudish or pro-vincial.
Germaine's mini-skirted young-est sister, Pierette (Emilie Leclerc), appears to have escaped the stifling neighbourhood for the liberated world of nightclubs. Linda and her friends idolize Pierette. One older woman, Mme Sauve (Kerry Sandomirsky), secretly befriends her. But most curse her, chanting, "Clubs are the road to hell!" In soliloquy, Pierette reveals herself to be as trapped and unhappy as the rest.
The genius of the play emerges in expressionistic choral numbers, choreographed by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and carved out by John Webber's lighting. Instead of turning on each other, the women lament together the everyday mis-ery of having to cook, clean, care for their ungrateful kids and hus-bands. Jointly, they bemoan "this stupid rotten life" and find comic ecstasy in the pathetic rewards of bingo.
In Ellen Gu's nicely varied pe-riod costumes the women climb all over the sturdy wood furniture of Drew Facey's tenement kitchen set, showing a kind of strength and resilience in the face of their ap-parent helplessness and hopeless-ness. The future will be brighter. They just don't know it yet.