Reality takes centre stage in Quebec documentary theater

Mass shootings, artificial intelligence and genetically modified foods are topics not often associated with theater.

But audiences in Canada’s Quebec province are flocking to documentary plays that seek to take on difficult topics and spur debate.

“Bringing reality to a stage is challenging,” especially when “tackling complex subjects,” says Marie-Joanne Boucher, an actress who co-produced a play about the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, an anti-feminist university mass shooting that left 14 people dead and deeply scarred the nation.

In the play, “Project Polytechnique,” two main actors recount the horrors of the attack and press the audience to consider what can be done to prevent more mass shootings.

The words of one of the survivors and of a police officer who was among the first to arrive at the grisly scene are recited, along with comments from a firearms enthusiast and anti-feminists who continue years later in online forums to justify the attack and adulate the killer.

“We say to the spectator: Come to the theater and you will be entertained, but you will also leave with a better overview of today’s society,” says Annabel Soutar, co-founder of Porte Parole, a pioneer of the genre in Quebec.

Over the past two decades, her theater company has produced about 20 plays on themes as diverse as hydroelectricity, genetically modified foods and health care. Since then, many other docu-theater companies have followed suit.

Debuting in the 1920s, in Germany and then in Russia, documentary theater initially developed to support communist ideology. It then spread during the 20th century throughout the world and moved away from propaganda to focus on social topics.