Review - Tremblay via Sara Stanley - Forever Yours, Mary-Lou

Michel Tremblay has created an enormous, interwoven, powerful body of work, all of which balances on the edge of a world between reality and shadows, all of which has been at the vanguard of social critique about religion and poverty in the daily life of Quebecois Montrealers. Anglo reviewers of Forever Yours, Mary Lou, running at Centaur theatre under the direction of Sara Stanley, seem to be taking issue with the translation not being close enough to the Quebecois joual, or the staging not being the same strict motionlessness of the original, but bah! bah! say I. These jabs serve to communicate the I Know Tremblay factor of the reviewer but to my mind miss the points and starry formations of this intense and lovely play.

I should say at this point that I’m fully biased as well; the stage manager Merissa Tordjman is one of my dearest allies; Carmen, the rebellious daughter in Forever Yours, is played by my friend Holly O’Brian; and the director, Sara Garton Stanley, I’ve known almost my entire life since she asked my dad to write a version of Oedipus for Die in Debt, which she directed under the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto when I was in my early teens. This was one of my first introductions to epic, socially relevant theatre; the 3 story temple tower under the looming overpass made for scenes of wild Bacchanalia, and a great cast party. I digress, but just to say, I’m biased as well.

Stanley’s direction of Forever Yours, Mary-Lou reflects a meticulous understanding of the grandiose and epic, and though the drama might at first glance seem small - small bitter battles between a small family - if you listen closely it is ravaging a vision of life based on fear of the body, fear of sex, fear created and controlled by a warped version of religious faith.

Alain Goulem by Yanick Macdonald

It’s the story of our entire cultural upheaval, still going on around the world, out of which only a few seem to be able to emerge and survive to follow their joy no matter what it looks like to those still stuck in the fear belly.

As the father, played by the remarkable Alain Goulem, says, “we are gears in a big machine, afraid to change it because we think we are too small.”

photo of Anthusa Harris and Holly O’Brian by Yanick Macdonald

Sara Stanley’s staging keeps the mother and father stuck to their armchair recliners, but she unleashes the daughters from the fixity in the original blocking. Manon, living a traumatized echo of her mother’s cold, closed, distorted reality where ‘faith’ is an excuse for hatred, and a studied lack of complexity and empathy, paces like a caged animal in the second floor of the stage. She listens to her selective memories of old fights, lights candles, prays and never ever leaves. She is played by Anthousa Harris with subtlty and tightly wound tenderness. She’s funny, childlike playing prim and ancient, until we see the depth of the hell she’s created for herself, the mechanic rigour of her choice of her own reality over the world’s, and then our sympathy drains from her, and we are left feeling a cold regret for her and for her parents who seem to never have been given much of a chance the way they were raised to ever escape their own fight, defend, and fear instincts. Manon can’t see them as human, can’t bring herself to be human either, so in the end she’s a ghost as they are, haunting their old apartment which we realize now is stretched under and inside the Metropolitan overpass, the scene of the family tragedy that frames the play. Reality is bent and juxtaposed and only Carmen can move beyond and through it, and all our hope goes with her.

Holly O’Brian by Yanick Macdonald

Carmen paces, races, strides gorgeously over and around all of this. Her blocking is complex, fluid, sexy, dance-like and it’s to Holly O’Brian’s great credit that it feels impromptu and gut-driven right up until the sudden moments where it changes, life flashes, and her movement becomes sculptural and weighted with every inch of the audience’s focus.

Sara Stanley and these 4 wonderful actors have found new rhythm, life, and energy in this play by allowing themselves to stretch beyond it’s original context of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution upheaval, where stillness fuming with bitter joual and no permission for an English translation from the author were the perfect elements to evoke the exact flavoured anguish of the time. Today the borders between ourselves and languages is blurrier, the battle with fundamentalist religion rages on with a different fury around the world and the critiques in this lovely tense, funny play are important beyond French Quebecois reality. They are in fact part of the great cultural gift Quebec can give the world, if we’ll allow ourselves to see and embrace the relationship between this and the similar painful distortions of religion, and control by culture, in other contexts.

Catherine Fitch as Mary-Lou by Yanick Macdonald

This is why I like how the lilt of the language in this translation, performed by these powerful actors, suggests Scottish protestantism as much as French Catholicism. I disagree with the reviewers who suggest this was a performance error in Catherine Fitch, I believe this is an intentional and powerful choice to subtly connect the narrative to other realms of human experience beyond the French 1970’s Quebec context. Fitch’s potent disgust as maman Marie-Louise is a knot of spitting fury, sharply horrifying and incredibly well played. I believe the acting in general is directed to lean far away from the gestural caricature we are accustomed to seeing that makes the ’70s working class french maman and papa easy to recognize, categorize, and dismiss. These stereotypes have been hammered and flattened out of the performances until the characters are left with only that which is emotionally raw and real. It’s uncomfortable to watch and feels unmoored and out of time. This is, for me, the exact reason it succeeds.

I believe Sara Stanley has done the practically unthinkable in becoming a famous female Canadian theatre director, drawing sold out crowds to a vintage play, and that she’s done so by relentlessly pursuing story and staging that activate our appreciation of Human Experience type things. It’s wonderful that she’s based in Montreal now - the energy in the Centaur on the night I attended the play felt awakened, the audience wasn’t entirely elderly and the laughs were electric to the actors who had nearly forgotten that there was humour in the play during emotionally arduous weeks of rehearsal. Not everyone liked it of course.. not everyone will. I was personally glad to see that the once default and listless Centaur standing ovation didn’t come, we had thoughtful serious applause instead and I think a hesitant, critical audience is better. One couple left after the first few goddamns, crawling unawares right over Sara Stanley sitting in their row. Too bad, they missed the messages the play was aiming right at them.

Forever Yours, Mary-Lou runs at Centaur until May 25, 2008.