Daughters and their mothers
Ifind myself writing about mothers, moons and feminism this week, having seen both the Cirque du Soleil’s mesmerizing acrobatic tribute to women, Amaluna (an invented word blending mother and moon) at the Old Port, and a modestly staged production of L’éclipse, by Joyce Carol Oates, at Théâtre Prospero.
Both works are the brainchildren of strong women who teach at major American universities. Oates, who visited Montreal last weekend to collect her Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, teaches at Princeton. The Tony Award-winning Diane Paulus, who conceived and directed Amaluna, teaches at Harvard.
Another thing that these two moon-referenced works have in common is a fascination with the mother-daughter bond. In the Tempest-inspired Amaluna, Prospera is the mother, Miranda the daughter.
In L’éclipse, we meet an ambitious young woman named Stéphanie (Debbie Lynch-white), who is about to launch her political career as a candidate for the first-ever, all-woman American political party. But her plans are short-circuited by her emotional inability to place her dementiaplagued, moon-obsessed mother in a nursing home.
The play begins with an irrational showdown between mother and daughter as they return home from the grocery store. The mother, Muriel (played by the always l uminous Andrée Lachapelle) has thrown a public tantrum, embarrassing her daughter. Stéphanie can’t restrain herself from arguing with her mother even though she knows it’s a no-win situation.
Having never known her father, she is strongly tied to her mother, bearing the unbearable while her sister, Julie, is long gone, preoccupied with her own family. The pressure builds, leading to a breakdown and a sudden departure.
When I spoke with Oates briefly after her Blue Met appearance, she hastened to say that mad Muriel bore little resemblance to her own mother. Unfortunately, she had to leave Montreal before the opening, otherwise she would have loved to see her play in French. The title should be reflected in the lighting effects, she said, expressing a hope that the irony would not be deleted.
Director Carmen Jolin has cast well, hinted at eclipses with shadows, and hit a credible yet witty tone with this rather slight, yet gracefully penned play. LynchWhite provides able support to Lachapelle, who is undeniably the star of a vehicle that seems to have been written for her.
There’s nothing extraordinary about L’éclipse, but it’s likely to hold special resonance for those who have served as caregivers of the elderly or are concerned with the issue of elder abuse.
L’éclipse, by Joyce Carol Oates, continues until May 19 at
Another play now on the boards in French in Montreal should be of special interest to anglophones, as it is penned by British playwright Lee Hall. He’s the man who wrote the screenplay for the movie Billy Elliot, then the book for the musical theatre version – with music composed by Elton John – that followed.
Les Peintres du charbon is the translation (by Monique Duceppe) of a play born in 2007 under the title The Pitmen Painters. Like Billy Elliot, it’s about people whose lives were tied to the coal mining industry. Based on a book of the same title, by William Feaver, the play chronicles the formation, trials and tribulations of a group of coal miners who took up painting. Actually, not all of the members of the famed Ashington group were working miners, but most were.
They met at the Workers Educational Association in 1934 in an art appreciation class taught by Robert Lyon, an art professor from the University of Durham. Lyon, ably portrayed in the Duceppe version of the play by Gabriel Sabourin, soon discovered that he bored his students with intellectual discussions of the Great Masters. So he encouraged them to do their own art, rooted in their own lives.
The experiment worked and the group endured for 50 years, until 1984, leaving behind a formidable body of work. Since 1989, a selection of the works of The Ashington Group have been exhibited in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum in Northumberland.
Les Peintres du charbon reduces the art class to five painters, including Oliver Kilbourn (played with true grit by Emmanuel Bilodeau), who was widely considered to be the most gifted of the lot. Because of this, he faces the temptation of being drawn away from the life he knows best, by a woman of means, played by long-time Robert Lepage collaborator Marie Michaud (The Blue Dragon).
The first act of Les Peintres du charbon, directed by Claude Maher, is so good that my guest and I spent the intermission wondering out loud why no one had yet produced it in English in Quebec. Sadly, the momentum slowed considerably during the second act. Our fascination with the subject matter, however, remained. And we stayed to view a slide show of Ashington Group paintings set up in the lobby.
File this one as well-acted and thought-provoking although not fully satisfying on all theatrical counts.