TREMBLAY’S YESTERDAYS, REVIVED
1970s comedy gets a modern redo — and he says ‘it’s a lot funnier’ this time around
With an adaptation of his early-1970s play Demain matin, Montréal m’attend opening next week, and the cast read-through of a new creation coming up at Théâtre Jean-Duceppe, even a writer of Michel Tremblay’s stature and accomplishments might be forgiven for feeling a little nervous. Perhaps weighing heavier on his mind was something taking place nearly 3,000 kilometres away.
“I’m worried I might not have a house in a few days,” he said during a conversation with the Montreal Gazette at his agency near Parc Lafontaine.
At the time of writing, hurricane Irma was making its way toward Key West, Fla., where Tremblay has written all of his plays and novels for the last 26 years, occasionally cycling past the home of his hero, Tennessee Williams, on the way to his regular café. (In a followup with Tremblay’s agency, we learned his house apparently escaped destruction, although any potential interior damage couldn’t be confirmed.)
Still, the new version of Demain matin, which previewed in June during Les FrancoFolies, and which director René Richard Cyr created by drawing from other sources in the Tremblay universe, was keeping him as cheerful as could be expected.
It’s a cynically funny cabaretstyle show about a small-town waitress attempting to follow in her sister Lola Lee’s footsteps to attain showbiz success in Montreal. She encounters the snarkiness of drag queens, wannabes and prostitutes along the way.
Tremblay is particularly pleased with the way Cyr (who transformed his Les Bellessoeurs and Sainte Carmen de la Main into musicals) has taken the script back to its rougher yet somehow innocent roots — “dirty clean” is how Tremblay puts it. It’s been stripped of much of the dazzle and polish of a 1995 incarnation by Denise Filiatrault (the play’s original Lola Lee) and returned to the Brechtian, Kurt Weill-ian style Tremblay intended when it debuted at the now-defunct Jardin des Étoiles at La Ronde in 1970.
Tremblay is also pleased with the way Cyr has polished up the jokes.
“When René asked me for the rights,” he said, “I said no at first, because I was afraid it had not aged well. I said the jokes are old jokes from the 1970s. They were funny and shocking at the time, but we’re used to it 47 years later. It’s a lot funnier in the way René has created it.”
Demain matin is just one Tremblay production heading our way. In December, Théâtre Jean-Duceppe is mounting Enfant insignifiant, his own adaptation of his recent novel Conversations avec un enfant curieux.
“I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever written,” Tremblay said of the novel. “I’d written some quite heavy stuff, going back from 1913 to 1941 and covering the (pre-Michel) life of my mother. It was a very serious nine-book cycle, so I felt like having fun. I went back again to my childhood, to the conversations I had with my parents.”
He chuckled — a distinctive and appealing heh-heh-heh — as he no doubt got a mental image of those days on Fabre Street. “I was always asking too many questions.”
Like the Duceppe’s delightful production of his 1998 play Encore une fois, si vous permettez last year, this new piece will again feature Guylaine Tremblay as the author’s beloved mom and Henri Chassé as the artist as a pesky young urchin.
Then next spring, Centaur Theatre hosts Tableau D’Hôte’s multi-META-winning production of the 1973 play Hosanna, which was, in 2015, the first English-language version to play in Montreal.
One scene in Demain matin depicts the stripping away of the drag accoutrements of the familiar Tremblay character La Duchesse de Langeais. Hosanna expands on this scene with its title character literally and figuratively stripping away her layers of disguise (a man playing a woman playing Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra).
Though Tremblay acknowledges that time and trans politics have moved on (some critics have accused Hosanna of being transphobic), he won’t be giving the play a makeover any time soon. Yes, he occasionally gives his blessing to somebody like Cyr to reimagine his material, but, he said, “I would never, ever try to modernize my plays myself. I know what I could do with Les Belles-soeurs, for example, so that it would be a better play, but I don’t touch it because it belongs to the first part of my life. What is interesting about Les Bellessoeurs is the youthfulness of it. It’s the same with everything I wrote in the ’70s. We were evolving very rapidly — Quebec was changing very rapidly.”
Tremblay, of course, had such a key role in accelerating that evolution that many of his plays, including Hosanna, have been seen as political allegories for Quebec’s struggle for selfhood. Tremblay, however, resists such interpretations.
“I was misquoted in the New York Times,” he said with a laugh, “and it’s been following me for 44 years. The journalist claimed that I had said that Hosanna was an allegory about Quebec and Canada. I never, ever said that.”
Having touched on politics, the conversation inevitably turned to the mood south of the border, where he lives most of his life these days. Are the political upheavals having an impact on the way he writes?
“Not in the way I write, because I never write about those kinds of political things — maybe I should, but I never did — but it’s certainly affecting the way I live because for the first time in years, there is gay-bashing in Key West. It’s as if there was gay-bashing in Provincetown (a popular LGBTQ vacation destination). It’s just never heard of.
“I thought about leaving a year ago, but my house is so beautiful and I’ve been there since 1991, so it would be very difficult for me to leave, but I would if it became more horrible than it already is. I read about people being told, ‘You’re in Trump Country now.’ It’s very worrisome.”
Also opening next week is
The History of Sexuality (MainLine Theatre, 3997 St-Laurent Blvd., Thursday to Sept. 30) from the new company Talking Dog Productions. It’s a verbatim theatre take on Michel Foucault’s provocative writings. And there’s still time to catch the end of the second edition of the MTL Clown Fest, which continues at MainLine until Sunday.
While we’re on the subject, you might see one or two clowns packing six-guns over at Monument-National, 1182 StLaurent Blvd., as Cirque Éloize’s new western-style show Saloon moseys into town from Wednesday to Sept. 30.