Fennario goes back to war
A new focus on female characters, and a return to familiar geographic and thematic territory
Verdun is renowned for its contributions to the First and Second World Wars, having sent a huge number of men overseas, while many of their wives and sisters laboured in the local munitions factory known as the DIL.
But behind all that glory, there’s a gritty story of tough people playing against stacked odds.
Playwright David Fennario, whose father served in the Second World War and whose mother worked in the DIL, has followed up his one-man Bolsheviki, about a First World War veteran, seen at Infinitheatre in 2010, with Motherhouse, his first woman-centric show.
It sets out to empathize with the women who worked at the DIL during the First World War. But it gets lost on its way to the factory, wandering off into left-wing rhetoric that tries to connect the dots between First World War conscription riots and the demands for free tuition by the students of the recent printemps d’érable.
Less of a play than a guerrilla spoken-word performance that throws a Molotov cocktail of attitude onto Centaur’s main stage, Motherhouse kicks off with a defiant casserole-banging session.
Fennario’s “fractured fairy tale” (his description) is directed with panache, projections and Black Watch puppets by Jeremy Taylor, on a striking bricks-and-mortar industrial wasteland set designed by Laurence Mongeau. It’s performed with heart and gusto by Holly Gauthier-Frankel (a.k.a. Miss Sugarpuss), with three other women (Delphine Bienvenu, Stephanie McKenna and Bernadette Fortin), dressed in factory duds adorned with red tags, as a backup song-and-mime chorus.
Fortin’s fiddle playing is one of the saving graces of a production that strives vainly to find a strong narrative in a rambling, muddled rant delivered by a lifelong Verdun resident named Lillabit (Gauthier-Frankel). After much chit-chat and singalong, she recalls the day she helped organize her fellow workers following an explosion at the munitions plant.
The playwright is noted for his ear for dialogue interplay but has stopped writing it in recent years, opting for one point of view over the competing voices that made his Balconville great. His current declamatory storytelling mode — which largely consists of digging up scraps of history, mixing them up with outdated ideology and comic ditties and tossing them at the fourth wall, hoping something might stick — is more suitable for a café theatre (or Le Bain St-Michel) than Centaur.
Meant as a companion piece to Bolsheviki, Motherhouse isn’t nearly as dramatically effective, nor as thoroughly workshopped. While the trappings are polished, the writing is rough draft. This hyped-up solo is at its best when it supplies enough detail to give a visceral sense of who the DIL women were and what they went through.
Fennario is better known for his vividly drawn male characters than his women, and Gauthier-Frankel tends to play the personality card. A more mature character actor might have delved deeper. For Bolsheviki, Robert King, a veteran of early Fennario plays like On the Job, was brought in to carry the monologue. A similar casting ploy probably wasn’t possible for Motherhouse. Now that Fennario has given women the spotlight, it’s up to a new generation of them to work together to find the play beyond the play.
Motherhouse, by David Fennario, continues to March 23 at Centaur Theatre, 453 St-François-Xavier St. Call 514-288-3161 or visit centaurtheatre.com.