Straight Jacket Winter rewarding fit
Collaboration between real-life couple examines culture shock of moving from French roots
In Straight Jacket Winter, a young couple struggles to fit in with their new milieu and make friends after moving from Montreal to Vancouver.
A collaboration between partners (in life and in theatre company Deux par quatre) Esther Duquette and Gilles Poulin-Denis, the new play was awarded the 2015 Prix Roland Mahé — Banque Nationale from the Fondation pour l’advancement du théâtre francophone au Canada. We talked to Duquette, who is the associate artistic director and general manager of Théâtre la Seizième, about the play, finding actors to portray her and Poulin-Denis and the state of her English:
Q: How autobiographical is Straight Jacket Winter?
A: It’s very autobiographical. Everything we’re telling is true. But the reality is embodied by Gilles and I because we are there telling the story. But we also have two actors playing us when we arrived in Vancouver in 2010. What they are playing is a little more theatrical. It’s still very true, but there’s a bit of fiction in the sense that we gave ourselves the liberty to sometimes represent stuff rather than just showing us as we were.
How did you find the actors you’re working with: Frédéric Lemay and Julie Trépanier?
Julie is from Quebec. She moved to Vancouver when she was younger. Then she returned to Quebec to go to school, then came back to work here. So she had the experience of moving back and forth between Montreal and Vancouver, which was really interesting for us. She’s also an actress that we have been working with for a long time at Théâtre la Seizième. She performed in À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou and Selfie, a few of our shows, and she’s very talented. So she was there from the very start, she participated in every workshop we did on the play. She’s really helped create the play on top of performing in it. Frédéric Lemay is an actor from Montreal and we chose him after an audition process. He’s doing a lot of TV and a lot of cinema. When he acts, he’s very naturalistic, which is what we were looking for.
Why did you think it necessary to have actors playing yourselves?
For many reasons. I am not an actress. But also, if we had played ourselves, there were some things that might have been a little too close, even like therapy or something and we didn’t want that. We wanted something larger than that, something universal. Having people playing us is giving us this distance.
One of the themes of the play is language. How would you describe your English when you first arrived in Vancouver?
I was disastrous! (Laughs.) We learned English in the Quebec school system, but I’ve never really had a chance to practise like many other Quebecers. So it was very rusty and not very practical; what we learned was not necessarily adequate for real life. You still hear me struggling a bit, but when I arrived it was so difficult for me. It was difficult me to order food. I’m still learning. It’s been a tough journey.