Bonjour’s provocative story prompts questions

THEATRE

2And you thought your family

was dysfunctional! Bonjour, là, bonjour shows a young man claiming himself from his kin—but it’s not your typical coming-of-age story. This excellent production is likely to inspire fierce postshow discussion.

Michel Tremblay’s 1974 script (revised in 1986) is a symphony of overlapping voices, as Serge’s family welcomes him back from a threemonth visit to Europe. His separate visits to his father, aunts, and four older sisters are piled on top of each other in time and space, amplifying the extent to which everyone seems to need something from him.

Serge’s retired father, Armand, lives with his own two perpetually dissatisfied sisters, Gilberte and Charlotte. Serge’s oldest sister, Lucienne, has married an Anglo doctor, but is so bored with her material wealth that she’s taken a younger lover. Sisters Monique and Denise both seek relief from their loveless marriages, one in pills, the other in food. Read no further if you don’t want to know the play’s big secret, but chances are you can figure it out just from reading a listing. The only happy sister is Nicole, and that’s because she and Serge are unapologetically in love with each other. Determined to escape from the fug of disappointment that surrounds everyone else in the family, Serge and Nicole commit to their incestuous relationship.

The play’s celebration of incest was taboo-shattering in 1974, but in 2017, it’s just perplexing. How are we meant to take this? Is it an allegory for other forms of forbidden love— less forbidden now than they were 40 years ago? It’s also hard not to feel uneasy about the fact that three of Serge’s sisters overtly treat him as a sexual object, and that almost all of the play’s female characters are harpies from whom the men need to be rescued. Sure, the play is billed as a tragedy, but if Serge is the tragic hero, it’s hard not to read this as misogynistic.

That said, there are great pleasures to be had in director Gilles PoulinDenis’s staging. Tremblay’s characters are richly textured, and this terrific cast skillfully handles the script’s rapid-fire overlapping dialogue while mining the bleak humour of their situation. With her tightly coiled hauteur, Lyne Barnabé’s Lucienne is riveting, as is Émilie Leclerc’s limply desperate Monique. Thérèse Champagne finds the comic rhythms of Charlotte’s selfpity, and Joey Lespérance is a deeply grounded Armand; his recollection of hearing his children’s voices for the first time is one of the show’s most affecting moments.

Drew Facey’s expressionistic set, with its fading wallpaper and an upstage tower of chairs, evokes the drab, oppressive stasis of the characters’ lives, and his costumes are period-perfect. Jeremy Baxter’s lighting and Poulin-denis’s sound enhance the claustrophobic atmosphere.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to see a classic done well—and to ask questions about what it might mean to us today.

> KATHLEEN OLIVER

ELBOW ROOM CAFÉ: THE MUSICAL

Book and lyrics by Dave Deveau. Music and lyrics by Anton Lipovetsky. Directed by Cameron Mackenzie. Musical direction by Clare Wyatt. A Cultch presentation of a Zee Zee Theatre production. At the York Theatre on Thursday, March 2. Continues until March 12 2As a work of musical theatre,

Elbow Room Café is a bit loose on its hinges, but as a celebration of community, it’s flamboyantly fun.

Dave Deveau and Anton Lipovetsky’s script is an adoring tribute to Davie Street’s legendary breakfast establishment and its owners, Bryan Searle and Patrice Savoie. We meet them here along with their employee, Nelson, and an assortment of patrons: Tim and Tabby, a straight Tennessee couple visiting Vancouver to celebrate their anniversary; Jackie, a lesbian getting together with Jill, the ex she dumped almost a year ago; and Amanda, a runaway bride coming off an all-night stagette with her friends Beth and Stephen.

The common thread here is com- mitment, with each table playing off the central partnership of the owners. Despite their nonstop vituperative banter, Patrice and Bryan are deeply devoted to one another. Patrice wants to get married; Bryan doesn’t. The bigger stakes—patrice’s desire to retire and let someone else run the restaurant before he and Bryan get too old—don’t emerge until the end of the first act.

Deveau’s comedy is very local, very gay, and way over the top; the real-life Elbow Room’s rules (e.g., “Watch your ass—gay men behind you”), posted on the upstage wall, set the tone. There’s a self-consciousness here that can be tremendously fun: Tim doesn’t seem to realize he’s in a musical, for example, and uptight bridesmaid Beth’s attempt to invoke “the customer’s always right” earns her a sting from the on-stage drummer. But it can also be overly earnest: Patrice and Bryan spend a lot of time explaining who they are instead of just being themselves, and the restaurant’s history and value to the community are awkwardly tacked onto the story, which moves in fits and starts.

But how often do you get to see a real place you love depicted on-stage? Elbow Room fans are unlikely to complain about the script’s dramaturgical deficiencies or the fact that some of Anton Lipovetsky’s songs feel forced, especially given the talent that director Cameron Mackenzie has heaped onto this show’s plate. As Tabby, Emma Slipp commands both the stage and her husband Tim, hilariously portrayed by Steven Greenfield in a state of hapless perplexity at these people so unlike the “friendly, apologetic” Canadians he’s read about. Justin Lapeña is a sassy Nelson and a vocal chameleon as various fantasy figures that torment Tim. As Amanda, Synthia Yusuf is a powerhouse singer, and along with Nathan Kay’s loose-limbed Stephen

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Bonjour,là,bonjour

and Stephanie Wong’s tightly wound Beth, she creates some of the show’s best physical comedy. Christine Quintana and Olivia Hutt are immensely likable as Jackie and Jill. As Bryan, David Adams anchors Allan Zinyk’s unrestrained Patrice. This is a true ensemble piece, and everyone seems to be having a blast.

Designer Marina Szijarto’s set affectionately re-creates the bright, celebrity-studded walls of the café, with a clever forced-perspective kitchen backdrop; and her costumes are as colourful as the show’s language. Musical director Clare Wyatt leads a tight all-female three-piece band.

Elbow Room Café has a few false endings; like the giant pancake breakfasts served up at its namesake, it can be too much of a good thing. But its power as a gesture of love for the people who have spent decades “changing lives, one egg at a time” is undeniable.

> KATHLEEN OLIVER ŠXW AM’ T ( HOME)

Directed by David Diamond. A Theatre for Living production, in collaboration with Journeys Around the Circle Society. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Sunday, March 5. Continues until March 11 2Joe (the always great Sam Bob) is

an indigenous man and residential-school survivor who is finding it harder and harder to connect with his college-age daughter, Siya (portrayed through a terrific performance by Madeline Terbasket). As she embraces her ancestral connections to the land through activism and decolonization, and confronts her friend, Chase (Mutya Macatumpag) who refuses to acknowledge her settler privilege, more questions emerge about her father’s background and their rift deepens. Siya also helps open the eyes of her friend Lucas (Asivak Koostachin), a young indigenous man adopted and raised by Doug (Tom Scholte), a white colleague of Joe’s, and his wife, Sarah (Rev. Margaret Roberts). Unacknowledged racism and fear have kept the couple from telling Lucas anything about his biological parents, his real name, or that he’s Cree. When Siya gives Lucas her medicine pouch, it sets off a chain of confrontations. Doug’s racism (obvious to everyone but him) also causes a work situation to go off the rails when he berates the new guy, Vincent (a powerful turn from Nayden Palosaan), an indigenous man he hired as a favour to Joe.

It’s a lot of story to squash inside 30 minutes, and things escalate sharply, convening at a real crisis point. But there’s no tidy resolution. Instead, this is where director David Diamond invites the audience inside the action. Theatre for Living’s forum style is ultimately an interactive approach wherein the play’s actors restage key scenes—moments of potential reconciliation that were blocked for any number of reasons—and any audience member can call “Stop” and come on-stage to take over a role of their choosing, with Diamond helping to facilitate different outcomes. It’s a brave thing to put oneself inside this vulnerable piece of theatre, and Diamond recontextualizes the world of the play versus the outside world by reminding everybody that nonindigenous people are just now starting to contemplate what reconciliation means and are taking baby steps, whereas indigenous people have already been doing the work for a long time.

This is an important thing to verbalize, because very quickly the night morphed into Theatre of White Fragility and ballooned from an estimated two-hour running time to almost three hours. Save for one or two genuinely moving interactions that had many people in tears, particularly a nuanced retelling of the scene in which Joe opens up about the trauma of his residential-school days, it became kind of exhausting, even embarrassing, how many whitepresenting audience members wanted to come up on-stage and re-centre the conflicts around, seemingly, their own whiteness and/or the white person’s feelings and experiences. A number of white-presenting people opted to take over from the indigenous actors and erase their characters almost entirely. Twice, white-presenting people took over the character of Doug, the racist adoptive father, employer, and friend, and just decided to make him not racist. Pretending someone just isn’t racist or denying racism is one of the most significant Canadian blockages to reconciliation! In the final instance of Doug’s takeover, the central issue became the adoptive white parents’ feelings about finally revealing their adoptive son’s Cree heritage. As the family wrestled with a path forward, the volunteer turned to Joe and suggested he could weigh in because “he has more experience with this kind of thing”. Bob, improvising Joe’s response, reacted as diplomatically as possible, replying, “I’m not Cree, but maybe I can offer some practical suggestions.” This is markedly different than what is scripted, which is a highly charged confrontation that challenges racism and white fragility, and prioritizes the fears and feelings of the young indigenous people, Lucas and Siya.

In that final restaging, the character of Siya was asked by Diamond to voice her most secret thoughts after witnessing a particularly revisionist scene. “Fuckin’ white tears,” Siya improvises, Terbasket’s delivery a perfect combination of contempt and resignation. What is asked of the indigenous actors here—some of whom must go to very dark, triggering places—just so the audience can spend a lot of time trying to erase the racist behaviour of the white male character? šxw am’t (home) is a provocative and powerful piece of theatre and engagement. The barriers it breaks down are significant, and I would like to see it again with a different audience because it was deeply frustrating to be surrounded by so many people who believe they’re good allies—those who show up to theatre like this and have an opportunity to engage in truly daring ways, but default to what they know: fuckin’ white tears indeed. This piece deserves so much more and I hope it gets that chance throughout the rest of its run, and with a tour next year.

> ANDREA WARNER