There’s more to country life than peace and quiet
When city people visit their rural relatives, they not only take a warm welcome for granted, timing be damned; they come prepared to be bored by the uneventful nature of country life.
In August, An Afternoon in the Country, Jean Marc Dalpé takes his own sweet time setting up an ordinary rural visit by a city aunt and her new fiancé on a hot summer afternoon — all in preparation for an inevitable explosion of seething resentments. The principal underlying cause for the blow-up is adultery of the flagrant kind, practised by the daughter of the couple who run the family farm, the ownership of which remains in question.
Economics is a factor in this drama, which blends Chekhovian detail into a Sam Shepard Molotov cocktail of domestic violence. For one thing, acid rain has contributed to the demise of maple syrup production. But city mores are creeping in, too. The daughter, Louise (Eleanor Noble), has taken up selling real estate and found a lover. Her jealous husband, Gabriel (Graham Cuthbertson), already carries a big chip on his shoulder about being the farm’s chief labourer for 21 years without having his name placed on the deed. For that matter, Louise’s easygoing father, Simon (Chip Chuipka), isn’t officially listed either. The farm apparently has been passed down through the maternal line. She who is cooking the roast, Simon’s wife, Jeanne (Pauline Little), and her mother, Paulette (Clare Coulter), seem to hold the paper rights, while Louise expects to inherit all.
Meanwhile, Louise and Gabriel’s rebellious teenage daughter, Josée (Arielle Palik), holds down a job, has dreams of making movies and complains that the adults aren’t interested in her ambitions. “I am the future!” she fumes.
This is what visiting aunt Monique (Danette Mackay), sister of Simon, and fiancé André (Pier Kohl) have walked into, Champagne bottle in hand, hoping to celebrate their upcoming nuptials.
The Centaur Theatre English-language premiere of Dalpé’s play, first produced in French at La Licorne in 2006, fell somewhat short of satisfying on opening night (Thursday). There were some powerful individual performances in this multigenerational drama, but it took the actors a while to warm up, get the plot points across and function as an ensemble.
Coulter is wonderfully true as the ornery grandmother. The play kicks into gear with Palik’s first entrance, and she’s a breath of fresh air throughout. Cuthbertson turns Gabriel’s entitlement rant, about long hours and no pay, into a showstopper. Chuipka is as authentically country as Kohl is pure golf-club smooth. And Mackay conveys her conflicted position well. The mother-daughter relationship between Little (who leans on deadpan) and Noble (who remains a cipher) needs layering.
And that’s just one of the things that director Harry Standjofski needs to pay attention to as he finetunes what remains an emotionally wrenching play based on vividly drawn characters — even though the ending, as it stands, doesn’t quite work.
Still, August, An Afternoon in the Country is a worthy, earnest production of a play by an important Governor General’s Award-winning playwright. James Lavoie’s rundown farmhouse set evokes the right atmosphere, as does the country-and-western music played on grandma’s radio.
Give it a week to settle in.
August, An Afternoon in the
Country, by Jean Marc Dalpé, translated by Maureen Labonté, continues at Centaur Theatre, 453 St. François Xavier St., until Oct. 28. Call 514-288-3161 or visit www.centaurtheatre.com.
pdonnell@montrealgazette.com