TOUGH LOVE
‘We can do better,’ says playwright Di Cesare
It seems particularly timely for a Michaela Di Cesare play to be hitting the Centaur stage.
The Italian-Canadian playwright’s vivid examinations of women’s struggles to be heard above the perceived machismo of her community seem just right for this moment in history. More so when you consider that her community has so far been represented theatrically, and largely on the Centaur stage, by two men, Steve Galluccio and Vittorio Rossi.
There’s a bit of irony, then, in the fact that Successions, which plays from April 10 to May 6, is about two brothers. Davide Chiazzese and Carlo Mestroni play the chalk-and-cheese siblings feuding over their recently deceased parents’ houseful of memories, secrets and junk. There’s support from Gita Miller and Tara Nicodemo as their longsuffering partners.
When I bring up the malecentric focus of the play during a conversation at the downtown café the Humble Lion, Di Cesare is disarmingly candid.
“I’ve kind of been shying away from saying this,” Di Cesare says, “but I read a Hannah Moscovitch interview yesterday and she said it, so I’m going to say it, too: I felt that if the main characters were men, there would be a better chance of it being programmed on a main stage. Hannah says she was told her plays were very much ‘vagina pieces’ when they were centred on women, and that they should be programmed in an experimental women’s festival context.”
That chimed with Di Cesare, who had been told as much about her own plays. These include 8 Ways My Mother Was Conceived, her one-woman show about the face-saving rumours of her unmarried grandmother’s “immaculate conception,” and In Search of Mrs. Pirandello, about the enforced silence of the wife of the great Italian playwright.
Di Cesare, however, insists there’s a lot more to Successions than shrewd strategizing.
“What I’m seeking to do with these male characters is to show what the patriarchy and internalized misogyny has done to men within the Italian community, and in immigrant communities beyond,” she explains. “There’s also this idea in Successions that men have mistreated women in this community and that the women in turn lash out at each other.”
Although Di Cesare stresses that her plays are “written with love” for her community — “I’m critical because I think we can do better and that we are better” — such criticisms have sometimes had a negative impact, whether in the form of family disputes (8 Ways created a rift with her mother, since repaired) or in the form of what she calls “gendered threats” on social media.
Di Cesare does consider that her plays have, on balance, given her a way back into the Italian community after her earlier, more rebellious years. She’s had support from the cultural centre Casa d’Italia, for instance, and a couple of years ago MNA Rita de Santis used her time during the Quebec National Assembly to highlight the playwright’s importance to Italian-Canadian culture.
Either way, Di Cesare isn’t about to succumb to a Mrs. Pirandellian silence any time soon. Last year she won first prize in Infinithéâtre’s WriteonQ! competition with Extra/ Beautiful/U, while this summer she’ll be travelling to Mignano in southern Italy to research for a planned play about a legendary Risorgimento-era female fighter. The name of this “Lioness of the South” might give pause to anybody who feels like trying to shut Di Cesare up: she was called Michelina De Cesare.
Di Cesare is just one of the many new playwrights Infinithéâtre has steered toward success through initiatives like Write-on- Q!, the Pipeline readings and the Playwriting Units. So you can hardly begrudge its artistic director, Guy Sprung, putting a new play of his own in the current season. And even if you’ve a mind to, Sprung can point to the fact that his two previous plays, Death and Taxes and Kafka’s Ape (which returns to Montreal in the fall), have been among the most successful in the company’s 30-year history.
This latest Sprung play, Fight On!, certainly looks like an intriguing prospect, being a hugely ambitious two-part take
on Canadian history as it pertains to First Nations communities. (The second half is slated for 2019.) It’s seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens’s son Francis, who immigrated to Canada in 1874, joined the North-West Mounted Police and played a significant (and not entirely glorious) part in putting down the Métis-led North-West Rebellion.
During a conversation with the Montreal Gazette, Sprung enthusiastically enumerates the 40-something costume changes through which the nine-strong cast will have to whip through in this workshop production. There will also be spectacular large-scale projections depicting everything from London’s smogfilled East End to Canada’s wide open plains, plus extensive and imaginative use of Infinithéâtre’s converted-church venue, Espace Knox.
Not surprisingly, Dickens Snr. is a major influence on the tone and content of the play, with quotes, and even characters, from the great man’s canon being woven into the action. Sprung, who is also directing, alludes to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s legendary 1980 production of Nicholas Nickleby as the kind of rollicking, sprawling theatrical experience at which he’s aiming (with, he promises, a touch of Blazing Saddles as well).
Sprung is well aware that, as a descendant of white settlers, his spinning a yarn that takes in the Indigenous experience might be considered “a bit iffy.”
Which is where part- Ojibwa playwright Drew Hayden Taylor comes in.
“Two years ago I sent Drew the project and I said, ‘Listen, why don’t you come on board and you can watch rehearsal and write blogs and set us straight?’ ” says Sprung. “‘And every time we have a cliché — say, talk about “drunken Indians” or whatever — you just knock us down.’ And he said, ‘You know, that sounds like fun.’ So his commentaries will arrive like red arrows on a video, and the cast will read them and play off of them.”
Indigenous experiences are also explored in La Cartomancie du territoire, Philippe Ducros’s multilingual play based on road trips to First Nations communities around Quebec. It plays through April 7 at Espace Libre, 1945 Fullum St., and is produced by Les productions Hôtel-Motel, one of many companies to have benefited from the latest round of intercultural theatre grants just announced by the Cole Foundation. Other companies taking a share of the $419,140 include Black Theatre Workshop, Geordie Productions, Nervous Hunter, Teesri Duniya, Scapegoat Carnivale and Simoniaques Théâtre, whose production of Simon Boudreault’s new play Comment je suis devenu Musulman opens Tuesday, April 3 at Théâtre La Licorne, 4559 Papineau Ave.