STAGE SHOW ADAPTATION
Trudeau takes audio route
It was the surprise hit of last summer’s Just for Laughs festival, but Margaret Trudeau’s solo stage show, Certain Woman of An Age, could hardly be classified as Seinfeldian.
True, Trudeau brought moments of great whimsy, but she also brought more moments of heart-wrenching emotion in three sold-out performances at the Gesü.
It was a compelling and candid warts-and-all confessional in which Trudeau recounted her lifelong battle with her demons. Nor did she hold back in recounting her dealings with a Who’s Who of politicos and celebs — from Fidel Castro to Ted Kennedy, Mick Jagger to Jack Nicholson — she encountered along the way.
“You’ll laugh. You’ll cry,” Trudeau had pledged. And, indeed, she left much of the audience doing both.
The show — written by Trudeau and Alix Sobler and directed by Kimberly Senior — also succeeded on another level: in helping to de-stigmatize mental illness.
Trudeau gave only 14 performances of the play, here as well as in Toronto, Chicago and New York. But the good news is that the play was recorded live at New York’s Minetta Lane Theatre and is now available as an audio presentation at audible.ca.
Trudeau has been booked to do three performances at Stratford in June and is also in discussions to take it on a Just for Laughs tour throughout Canada.
“I’m a mental-health advocate to the core,” Trudeau said in a phone interview. “I think everyone who has gone through a mental-health crisis, has sought treatment and has got well, has an obligation to share their hope with what they went through with others.”
Trudeau is a survivor. Though animated and upbeat now, she went through hell for a long spell. She was committed three times to institutions.
Her life was hardly Camelot, when as a 23-year-old free spirit she married the 51-year-old, less-free-spirited prime minister Pierre Trudeau. She wasn’t prepared for the protocol to come or life with Pierre.
“He was a feminist, as long as you weren’t married to him,” she cracks in the play.
Giving birth to her three sons, future prime minister Justin, Sacha and Michel, while in her mid-20s was to precipitate major postpartum depression issues. But it was the tragic death of her youngest son Michel in an avalanche in 1998 that so devastated her and just about did her in.
It’s one thing for an actor to play the painful life of a stranger, but quite another when it’s the actor’s own painful life being played.
“Honestly, I had always wanted to be an actor,” she says. “After my marriage to Pierre was over, I went down to New York to study. I really loved it. I was honing my skills, but then I found myself having to make a choice. I had to go back to Ottawa and raise my three little boys.
“I ended up doing more reality TV in a sense, doing interviews. It wasn’t supposed to be acting. But, then again, doing this play isn’t really acting on a certain level, either.
“But actually to get to do this play … wow!” exclaims Trudeau, also the mother of Alicia and Kyle from her second marriage to her ex, Fred Kemper. “It’s the real deal.”
Trudeau gives full credit to director Senior and co-writer Sobler.
“(Senior) pushed me, and she pulled me where I needed to be. And (Sobler) was really able to help me have fun with the audience by getting them involved with the show rather than just me lecturing them about mental health.
“We’re all hurting. Trying to have a happy and contributing life is the goal, but depression is the thief that takes you out. As a mania, it causes nothing but damage.
“Through humour we open another part of our brain. I like to be a bit comedic. Unfortunately my life has been a tragedy as well. I’ve resolved a lot of pain and loss, and I’ve learned that’s life, too.”
Trudeau was one of the women singled out in the Montreal Gazette’s International Women’s Day editorial last Saturday as someone who has made a difference.
Trudeau has found much support for her efforts in dealing with mental illness, both from the public and her kids.
“Some of the stories may have been a little shocking to the kids, but they have all listened as I have listened to them.
“When one has a mental illness, all in the family are affected. So you have to work as a family together for healing, and we have.”
While she lived under a microscope during her days with Pierre, she concedes that life for Justin and wife, Sophie Grégoire, can’t be a picnic with omnipresent social media she didn’t deal with.
“I was isolated and cut off in my ivory tower, but Sophie is involved with so much in charities, in mental health. That makes all the difference. Life is difficult because of social media. But she’s not just the wife. She has her own voice.
“Being just the wife of the prime minister is so archaic,” said Trudeau, who is in self-isolation because she had recently travelled with Grégoire, who has tested positive for COVID-19. “I thought so at the time.”
And Trudeau paid the price for so thinking.
“But now I have a beautiful life for which I’m most grateful.”