“What do you say when there are no words?” repeatedly asks seemingly every character in Michel Tremblay’s new play, Fragments de mensonges inutiles. Unfortunately for playgoers, words seem to be about all the play has to offer.
The play begins with a premise that requires heavy suspension of disbelief on the audience’s part: that a gay teenage boy named Jean-Marc (Olivier Morin) living in the 1960s in embroiled in a tortured romance with another teen boy, Manu (Gabriel Lessard), living in 2009. The play never addresses how this is possible, preferring to merely use the contrived situation as a mechanism to explore the different attitudes of family and society towards homosexuality in these different eras.
The set is simple: a checkered floor, and a stage divided in two: one the left-hand side (1960s), a white wall with a black cross hanging on it, on the right (2009), an unadorned black wall. Chairs provide the only props.
The play opens with both teens making love, fully nude. Making the scene problematic was a seeming discomfort on the part of the actors . For an explicit scene like this to work, the actors must feel absolutely comfortable with each other, and with the material. Although it might have been a case of opening-night nerves, this ease was not present on Wednesday night at the Theatre Jean Duceppe.
The next scene involves a breakup between the two boys, although the breakup seems to be more of an excuse to move the plot’s action along than anything that truly stems from the teen’s relationship issues.
The two boys, heartbroken, fall into depression, prompting the adults in their lives to launch an investigation into the source of the children’s misery. For the 1960 side, this involves a distant father (Normand d’Amour), a priest (Roger LaRue), and a fiercely loving mother (Maude Guérin).
On the 2009 side, we have a psychiatrist (Gabriel Sabourin), a somewhat self-absorbed mother (Linda Sorgini), and a very well-meaning and open-minded father (Antoine Durand). What follows is two-odd hours of melodramatic dialogue, often consisting of the characters repeating the same lines, over and over. And over.
The play’s difficulty lies not only in the repetitive text, but in the over-the-top performances given by the entire cast. There is not a line that isn’t shouted, wailed or wept, rendering much of the text less powerful.
Of the material that does work, all the best goes to the 1960s side of the play, unsurprising for Tremblay. Olivier Morin and Maude Guérin are the cast standouts as Jean-Marc and Nana (cyphers of Tremblay and his mother, a recurring theme in his work). Both have powerful scenes in standing up the the nosy priest out to expose Jean-Marc’s sexuality.
But these scenes come early in the play, and after that the action goes downhill. The 2009 scenes are so banal as to be ridiculous, with much of the melodrama totally contrived. None of the characters seems to care much about anything, so their dramatic moments fall flat.
Manu gets mad at his too-cool dad for not being strict enough, and calls him a “pink man”. This simple accusation suddenly plunges his father, previously easily the play’s most well-adjusted character, into an apparent existential crisis. This seems designed only to give Durand’s character a Big Scene, where he can repeatedly shout, “A pink man? A PINK MAN!” at the top of his lungs.
The yesterday/today juxtaposition remains a distraction throughout the play. A scene where the fathers are talking with their sons simultaneously while one teen reads his Bible and the other Blackberries is ridiculous, and when the well-meaning 2009 father gently asks why his son doesn’t contact Jean-Marc, I had to suppress the urge to stand up from my seat and yell, “Because he doesn’t have a fucking time machine!”
The play is directed by Serge Denoncourt, returned to Montreal after setting the Vegas strip on fire like a pile of flaming manure with “Chriss Angel: Believe” an ill-fated co-production between Angel and Cirque du Soleil. Horrible reviews and poor attendance forced the Cirque to do the unprecedented and slash its ticket prices. In a recent interview with the Gazette’s Pat Donnelly, Denancourt admitted, “Las Vegas is not the place for me.”
In the same interview, Tremblay said that he held back the play for one year until Deancourt could return to direct it. Given the result, perhaps this wasn’t the best idea.
Tremblay remains a near-canonical figure in the Quebec arts scene, and since I’ve never read a review where a local critic dared to give him more than a gentle slap on the wrist, the show is virtually assured unanimously glowing reviews. The opening-night audience dutifully rose to their feet for a standing O. While the cast may have deserved an A for effort, an O is in doubt.
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