Masks of Language, Culture, and Community: "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar

Masks of Language, Culture, and Community: "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Barl CARA GARGANO When Quebecoise playwright Marie Laberge premiered Le Night Cap Bar in Montreal in 1987. most critics compared it unfavorably to her earlier work, calling it a mere "thriller policier," with none of the "social and psychological import" of her earlier plays (Hart).' For many, the play's very genre seemed to diminish its importance, suggesting that its status as a murder mystery reduced its capacity for serious discourse: Marianne Ackerman referred to "a minor genre straining to be something else." Critic Bruno Dostie, however, called Le Night Cap Bar Laberge's "sweet revenge" for the lukewarm critical reception in M ontreal of an earlier play.) I find Dostie's term, however unintentionally , particularly felicitous; the play is threaded through with revenge on every level, and Laberge's thriller, far from being minor, depends on the thriller genre itself to accomplish a multilevel revenge for much more than the unenthusiastic critical response to which Dostie refers. While the thriller may today be considered a minor genre. it became, in a broad sense, the paradigm for western drama when Aristotle chose Oedipus Rex as the prototype for Greek tragedy. Rene Girard suggests that, for Aristotle , tragedy assumed the function of a disappearing sacrificial ritual, "directly linked to violence [tragedyI is a child of the sacrificial crisis" (65). Sophocles' play became not only a replacement for ritual, but an investigation and reenactment of the ritual function of "keepling] violence mltside the community" (92; emphasis in original). For Girard, "[aln investigation into the nature of ritual resembles the sort of criminal investigation r...1in which the solution of the mystery depends on a reenactment of the crime" (200). The hero is an active participant in this, not only in the rise of reciprocal vio1 ence - that is, of the crime itself - but in the search for and designation of himself as the surrogate victim; in this sense, he both commits the crime and "solves" the mystery . He is both detective and murderer. He actively bears away the communal sin and lives out its expiation.4 Modern Drama, 47: I (Spring 2(04) 82 "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 83 Girard posits an original. spontaneous communal event in which individual human faces became indistinguishable within a mob that suddenly sacrificed one of its own; however, he also suggests that ritualized masking leads to social containment ofviolence. In the theatre, the use of ritual masks erases differences between characters and the actors who portray them; "mimetism," the basis of traditional western drama, is for Girard "a source ofcontinual conflict" because of its capacity to erase or blur differences (169). When violence is staged within a theatrical framework, it is displaced onto a surrogate victim. There is, of course, an obvious correlation between the dual nature of Girard's hero and the nature of the actor, who is both character and not-character. The actor, then, becomes a sacrificial hero, a"monstrous double" (143-<58); in this sense, his sacrifice of self parallels and recreates the hero's erasure of differences. While Girard writes that today we assume "that collective violence [... J is an aberration" (8 t), feminist writers since Simone de Beauvoir have shown that collective violence toward women, particularly in its verbal and discursive form , continues to be adaily reality. Helene Cixous identifies the western stage since Greek tragedy as a metaphor for the inevitable victimization of women, a site where the ritual enactment of violent female sacrifice is played out. In "Aller ala mer," Cixous uses her now-famous metaphor of the murder scene to express what she perceives as a daily sacrifice of women in the theatre and the theatre as the distillation of violent masculine fantasy. She identifies the victim as "the Father's daughter, his sacrificial object 1...1With even more violence than fiction, theatre, which is built according to the dictates of male fantasy, repeats and intensifies the horror of the murder scene [...1" (546). While Cixous later discovered the theatre as a powerful agent for change, her metaphor remains one of the most popular for describing women's situation onstage for most of theatrical history. Cixous' female sacrificial object is very different from Girard's male sacrificial hero both in theatre and in life.' Unlike the hero, she does not sacrifice but is sacrificed. A comparison between the characters of Oedipus and lphegenia suffices: she is not permitted the heroic task of bearing away collective guilt but must be summarily dispatched by the hand of the Father.6 Like Cixous, Erving Goffman links the presentation of self in everyday life to the metaphor of the theatre. Goffman suggests that the individual creates a persona, or series of personae, that mediates between individual desire and communal expectation. For Goffman, the theatricality inherent in appearance is based on a contract between audience and perfonner, and by extension, among members of a culture or social group; this appearance or mask is grounded in social expectations of gender, race, class, culture, and geography, among other contextual variables. The idea of a relationship between everyday life and the stage is not new; Goffman's contribution is the radical notion that there is no single, concrete identity beneath the series of masks we present. In a sense, the self becomes its presentation. CARA GARGANO Unlike Goffman, however, Cixous distinguishes between masculine and feminine presentations of self; it is the Father who chooses the daughter's masks. In a similar vein, Claudine Herrmann7 points to the pecuJiar situation of the actress who takes on the mask of words that men have written for her; neither Herrmann nor Cixous sees the same agency for the actress that Girard presumes for the actor or that Goffman sees in the presentation of self. While both Cixous and Henmann draw an analogy between the role of sUent victim onstage and that role in life, they also show that the masks assumed by women are often not of their own design but are assigned to them by society. While Le Night Cap Bar reveals the masks that all performers construct, the play deals most particularly with the traditional faces that women wear, onstage and in life, and with the ways they negotiate their masking. Le Night Cap Bar asks what happens when a female character wears a traditional social mask only to subvert it, "pretending" to perform her "role" while using that role to seize creative control, to rewrite the scenario of her life, and to attack the conventions within which she must perfonn. In this context, Laberge 's protagonist breaks Goffman's social contract and enacts an important revolutionary gesture; she becomes "unreadable," avoiding her sacrificial objectification by manipulating both the theatrical and the social conventions that require it. Similarly, the play asks what happens to the theatre's ritual and sacrificial function when the victim appropriates the power and violence that are embodied in the moment of sacrifice within the dramatic narrative and then breaks the contract. Ritual masking only appears to contain violence, here, while actually leaking it into society. In this s'ense, Laberge's choice of "the murder scene" as the site of one of her most controversial and neglected plays is more significant than it first appears. The intrigue of Le Night Cap Bar turns on an investigation of the apparent murder of Raymond Thivierge, the proprietor of the bar.s The first three scenes are dramatized testimonies from three women who have been intimately connected to him and present three different versions of the events that led up to the discovery of Raymond's murder. Le Night Cap Bar, like Akira Kurasawa's film Rashomoll, restagesthe murder scene from different perspectivesto such an extent that the characters have no stable identity and there can be no single point of view. The plot is complicated and foregrounds issues of memory and of how history is "written." Years earlier, Agathe and her now-estranged husband Raymond opened the Night Cap Bar, where Raymond played the piano and Agathe sang his songs. Agathe was supplanted in his affections and on his stage by Suzy, some ten years younger. Humiliated, Agathe left for Montreal and a singing career that never materialized, finally becoming a concierge in an impoverished section of town. Conversely, in the intervening years, Suzy used her position at the bar to attract and marry a young lawyer from a prominent local family. She was replaced at the bar in her tum by Linda. a troubled young woman barely out of her teens. "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 85 Each of the first three testimonies/scenes begins with Agathe's return to the bar after her long absence and ends with the discovery of the murder. The scenes are arranged in the order of the women's relationships with Raymond, and each replaying of the events offers a different perspective on and different possibilities and motivations for each one of the women as the potential murderer . According to Agathe, Raymond sent her a letter requesting her help, but Suzy tells her that this is not possible since he had been the victim of an attack, possibly by drug dealers, that had left him paralyzed, speechless, and helpless. Agathe, Suzy, and Linda talk about their lives, their relationships with Raymond and with each other, and each scene ends with the dramatic discovery of Raymond's apparent death. We know the characters only through this dramatized testimony and, because of the personal agendas connected to the depositions, it is impossible to "know" them at all. As the characters move through each deposition/scene, each assumes a subtly altered mask, forcing us to see the arbitrariness of the "faces" we assign to OUf acquaintances and the way each individual constructs a unique reality. The roles themselves have mythic resonances: Raymond functions, as Robert Saletti suggests, as a symbolic or substitute "Father" (99); Agathe, now forty-two, represents the passive and ineffectual mother; Linda, twenty-two, is the perennial daughter, drugged and incapacitated. Suzy/Solange, at thirty-six, is poised at a curiously ambiguous position between the other two women and steps "out of the plot" to comment upon and manipulate the reality we see.9 This replay of the familial relationship, fractured and dysfunctional, is a frequent theme for Laberge and reminds us of the Greek tragedies, where, as Girard points out, incest and loss of distinction can so easily precipitate a crisis. While the first three scenes replay the moment when Raymond's "death" is discovered, the fourth scene elucidates the mystery. This scene reveals that Raymond is still alive and that his murder was a cover for the theft of a substantial amount of drug money. Suzy has engineered it all, setting up Raymond 's cousin Louis to be killed in his place, sending a false letter of appeal to Agathe, and enabling Linda's addiction. She has manipulated the other women as witnesses and arranged for Agathe to be convicted for the "murder ." At the end of the play, she slowly takes a gun from her handbag and "shows" it to the audience; later we hear a gunshot offstage and we know that she has betrayed Raymond as well, killing him "again." In a telephone call, heard in a blackout, she arranges to bum down the bar and fly off to Geneva with the money. Suzy has written and directed this "show," playing on her society's expectations of female masks to accomplish her goal. Raymond's multiple "deaths" are at the heart of Laberge's revisionary project. Barbara Freedman argues that, because of its repetitive and prismatic nature, "theatre provides the tools - the stages, the mirrors, or reflecting gazes - through which perspectives are fragmented, shattered, and set into play against one another" (152). Girard restates this in the language of sacrifice: 86 CARA GARGANO ''The sheer repetition of the sacrificial act - the repeated slaughter of the same type of victim - inevitably brings about [...) change" (39). By replaying the murder scene over and over, Laberge magnifies the crime, as murders multiply exponentially. The Father dies five times in the play, three times as Raymond, at the end of the first three scenes, once as Louis, and again as Raymond in the fourth scene.'o Through this ritual repetition, Laberge engineers a complex deconstruction of the sacrificial function of the theatre to accomplish a radical and comprehensive revenge, on asociomythic level, for Cixous' "murder scene"; using the thriller's capacity simultaneously to investigate and reenact itself, she leads it to orchestrate its own demise. Le Night Cap Bar turns the murderous act back upon itself almost self-reflexively. Using the technique of multiple stages, where performers perform performance, Laberge parodies the stage as murder scene, engaging in a complex dialogue with the theatrical form itself and inverting its traditional scenario. She does so by investing her female protagonist with the capacity to kill with words and the power to adopt the ritual mask that Girard assigns to the hero's masculine realm. Suzy, Laberge's protagonist, assumes the surrogate victim's "ability to master all violence" (Girard III), without fulfilling the other half of the sacrificial contract. The event reaches mythic proportions and the entire play becomes the scene of its own death. The play's three depositions finally emerge as uncertain in their validity as testimony; they are all contaminated by Suzy's rewriting of the events. In this, Laberge also betrays the principal convention of the traditional thriller: that all the clues are present within the body of the text. Trahison, or betrayal, is at the heart of this play. The word appears in the character description of each of the three women: Linda is "a girl who has been betrayed to the bone" (12); Agathe is "another betrayed woman, but consenting, almost ..." (12). The language of these descriptions, the passive verb form in the one and the ellipsis in the other, calls for the characters to be staged as weak and subject to direction. This contrasts with the description of Suzy, who "appreciates the authority she has and cannot even imagine the word betrayal" (12). She is doubly dangerous because, while Agathe and Linda betray themselves and each other through their inability either to recognize the masks they have been assigned or to imagine a way to manipulate them, Suzy assumes the authority necessary to define herself and her world. Suzy was played by Laberge in the original production; this conflation of character and playwright insists on Suzy's authorial authority to manipulate masks and appropriate the power of representation . Authorial and directorial power are foregrounded in this play: if Agathe's and Suzy's depositions seem to follow theatrical narrative conventions. the important linguistic and narrative differences between them subvert those conventions when we realize that they are different accounts of the same moment in time. Linda's deposition is even more destabilizing, as it reveals "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 87 the characters as actresses, who, discouraged by Linda's lack of direction and her inability to maintain a linear narrative, stop, start, replay a scene, and finally sit down, frustrated by her faulty memory. This scene, coming after two dense and almost overdetermined scenes, has holes and gaps in the narrative and is sparsely furnished with intention, motivation, action, or obstacle. Its lack of dramatic structure calls attention to the authored nature of the earlier scenes and the scene that follows. The fourth scene appears to return to a traditional form but, upon closer examination, further betrays the narratives of the previous scenes and increases spectator mistrust. In this scene, we learn that Suzy, as secretauthor, has manipulated the witnesses, who, in turn, have directed each other in this mise en abfme I mise en scene of the theatrical process; alI infonnation is retroactively contaminated by her belatedly revealed authorial position. Marianne Ackerman, in her review of the play, complained that "the audience never gets a firm hold on how truthful each revelation may be." Indeed, that would seem to be the author's point, as she refuses to allow the audience to pin down theatrical narrative. Robert Saletti very justly points to the importance of the monologues in this play, and indeed, as legal testimony, the first three scenes can be considered as monologues, even though all three characters appear in all three depositions/ scenes. The monologue has long been an important device in Quebec theatre, as Renate Usmiani I I has shown, and was also a favorite technique in the early Quebec feminist canon. 12 In these traditions, the monologue is seen as a moment of "truthful," if sometimes painful, personal revelation, just as legal testimony is delivered under oath. Laberge, however, continually subverts the theatrical and social conventions of the monologue in Le Night Cap Bar. For example, Agathe's monologue in Suzy's deposition actually convicts her, but we learn in scene four that it never took place at all and that Suzy interpolated the monologue after hearing the story from Raymond some time previously: SUZY [...1I even told that story about her father to make it sadder, to give her extenuating circumstances. RAYMOND You bitch! Ishould neverhave lold youabout that. SUZY It was good ... it made it seemmore real. And the coroner was so moved. Even Agatha cried ... it was a real soap opera. Ihad to give hersome reason to kill you. You know how a crime of passion grows in the telling. (158-59) We learn that the most moving moment in the play didn't happen, and we see how a playwright can take a casually reported story and animate it into theatre . History becomes more moving when it is theatricalized: even Agathe, who knows the story is not true, cries in court. Laberge not only gives us the "murder scene" but points to its inauthenticity, revealing the more mundane 88 CARA GARGANO "reality" of the event, which is, of course, considerably more sordid and less touching. In an important sense, then, the monologues of the play do not belong to the characters but have all been written by Suzy, calling attention to the character as character and to her/his lack of autonomy in the face of authorial power. In Greek tragedy, the word has the power to "kill," since most violence is recounted and not enacted for the audience. It is the author's language that determines the characters' fates. For Laberge, linguistic violence is "one of the worst forms of violence we have to endure in this life" ("Marie Laberge" 66). In all her plays, language is profoundly connected to the negotiation of violence, the mask, and the presentation of self. In her early plays, her protagonists , both female and male, seek to avoid the dominant role or the role of the victim that language offers them. In Avec /'hiver qui s'ell viellt (1981), Maurice Gingras refuses the mask of paternal discourse that would mark him as the Father and seeks to remain a child. In Jocelyne Trudelle troLlwie morte dans ses larmes (1983), the protagonist shoots herself through the mouth, literally murdering her voice. In L'Homme gris (1986), e ri-eri (whose very name evokes the cry for help she never voices) has become both anorexic and aphasic, in her attempt to hide from the patriarchal gaze, and never speaks onstage. These characters all see language as a mask that can only betray them, turning them into the puppets of a domineering and dominant patriarchal , authorial system. In Goffman's sense, they fear that the mask will appropriate the actor. Later Laberge protagonists, however, find that if, 'as Teresa de Lauretis notes. writing impJies a position of power. it also necessarily implies violence and that there is no way to renounce the power and violence that goes with discourse.13 Suzy is the first of Laberge's protagonists not only to accept the power and violence that go with discourse but to appropriate and even embody them. While, in early plays, linguistic violence is primarily masculine , in Le Night Cap Bar, as Laberge says in her interview with Paul Eliani, "the characters are women who are extremely violent on the level of language " (66). As Denise Gagnon, who played Agathe in the first production, has said, "/Tlhis play takes us, paralyzed and frozen, into the arcana of power" (39). Seizing the violence of language is equated with seizing social power, and later characters, who profit from Suzy's lineage, are able to reverse the traditional economy of linguistic power and use it in a less destructive way. For Laberge, theatrical violence must always belong to the semiotic and the rhetorical. She dislikes the kind of sexual violence often referred to in her work and never represents it directly onstage. While her work is often extremely violent in its language and subject malter, that violence is usually mediated in its nature as a "staged" activity and, as in Greek tragedy, is usually recounted rather than enacted. The repeated discovery of Raymond's "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 89 death at the end of each of the first three scenes, Suzy's description of mutilating Raymond's cousin Louis and of his subsequent death, and the murderous gesture she makes for the audience's benefit (she shows the gun to us as an obvious aside) at the end of scene four, all implicate the audience through their own specular imaginations, since they cannot "see" the violent acts that are described but must "stage" them for themselves. As in Greek tragedy, Laberge's characters are, for all practical purposes, "killed by words" (Girard 98) and by the audience's ritual complicity. Le Night Cap Bar reminds us that the words are always those of the playwright, given credence by the spectator 's willing suspension of disbelief. Laberge conflates Suzy's power with her violent manipulation of language. Suzy "snatches the tongue" (see Herrmann) of masculine discourse and turns bodies into mask/texts to be read by the audience/jury, scripting them through her theatricalization of language. Girard notes that language, "made up of differences r...Jfinds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation directly" (64), even as feminist writers have shown that language often functions to keep women in their (silent) place. Suzy uses violent language as she uses physical violence, as she says, "like a man" (159), but this is not simply a case of a female character taking on a masculine role. Suzy herself avoids any concrete representation of self at all; she transcends distinctions of gender, not only by revealing the tools that traditionally control representation, but by controlling her own image as image. According to Lucia Folena, "Naming or renaming [, .. Jamounts to waging the first offensive in the war of cultural representation" (221). Suzy's first attack on representation is directed toward her own social masks; she tries to replace "Suzy," the former stripper at the Night Cap Bar, with "Solange," the lawyer's wife. The difficulty of escaping the past and changing the expectations about representation is clear when, although Suzy announces that she has changed her name (27), both Agathe and Linda continue to refer to her as "Suzy": AGATHE Suzy Boivin .,' I can't get over how much you've changed. SUZy First of all. that's not my name anymore: I went back to my real name, and my husband's too, ofcourse. I'm Solange Rinfrette ... well, Boivin-Rinfreue, if you like. AGATHE I'm not sure Ido like it as much ... I liked Suzy Boivin. (27) This exchange begins and ends with the name that Suzy is trying to escape; Agathe literally pins her to her past, framing her in the proscenium arch of the name. Suzy discovers that she can only eradicate her first mask by eradicating everyone who knew her, reminding us how difficult it is to change traditional social and dramatic narratives. That she finally accomplishes this by pinning Linda and Agathe to their own pasts and to the names/roles by which society 90 CARA GARGANO "knows" them shows that, while Agathe's gesture is on a social level, Suzy's is a more comprehensive and mythic understanding of the poetics of mask making. Laberge emphasizes Suzy's unstable identity by having Linda "name" her differently in each of the women's depositions. In Agathe's telling of the story. Linda refers to Suzy as "madame avocat," "madame docteur," or, later, "madame Lajuge" (63), all titles of civil authority. In Suzy's scene, these titles tend toward the aristocratic, suggesting inherent wealth and authority: "La com/esse," "La duchesse," "Ia reine-mere." In Suzy's telling. Linda also cans her "La mere-superieure" (96) and makes several references to Suzy's "mothering "; in this way, Suzy delicately presents herself in the morally elevated stance of the traditional quebecoise mother, who embodies all the values that society holds sacred. In Linda's own deposition, perhaps the most revealing of the three, despite its gaps and narrative lapses, Linda simply refers to Suzy as "/a boss." The instability of Suzy's name reveals much of the instability of the play, and her masks shimmer in and out of focus as she moves between the "Solange" mask that she is trying to create and the "Suzy" mask of a passionate , sexual woman that she periodically assumes. As audience, we believe, at first, that we are privileged: in scene four. when Suzy "shows us" hergun, we assume she is letting us see her "real" self in the conventional theatrical aside. Later, however, we realize that we, too, have been duped, and that we are never to meet the real Suzy, who stages herself to the audience as she stages herself to the other women, to Raymond, and to her husband Georges; multiple framings serve only, in the final analysis, to frame an empty frame. The need to murder her past selves, as well as anyone (including the audience ) who might remember them, is clear in Suzy's final telephone call, heard on tape after she has left the stage: "I've liquidated the past [... J You can bury a past, it becomes almost nothing, a pile of ashes ... All myoid love letters are at the dump and that's where they'll stay .. . [...1make a nice fire and think of me" (176). That this call is heard in a blackout suggests that the character has already moved on to a mask that we cannot "recognize." Her disembodied voice not only suggests the unseen playwright but also presumes a continued play between representation and elusiveness on the character's part. Her last line, "[W1e'1l have a big party [...J we'll show them .. ." ('76; emphasis added) reaffirms her obsession with appearance in Goffman's sense and promises future representation, not of self, but of yet other staged selves. Barbara Freedman suggests that "strategies of power are directly related to the control of the spectator's gaze" (t86); while this play is about strategies of theatrical and social power, it makes a distinction between performance that is subject to the gaze and performance that manipulates the gaze. All three of the women have performed on the Night Cap Bar stage, Agathe singing Raymond 's songs, Linda dancing nude, and Suzy doing a striptease. While both "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 91 Agathe's and Linda's performances make them subject to the gaze in the traditional sense, Suzy's striptease is the art of appearing to reveal what will never be seen. Agathe remembers Suzy's emphasis on costume: "[Y]ou never could sing I...]It wasn't for nothing you wanted us to wear costumes, it was to call attention to yourself' (36). Agathe's assertion that Suzy wanted to call attention to herself is both revealing and misleading, since Suzy actually performed a costume/mask, not to show herself, but to promote the mask. The play itself does a striptease dance, as Suzy creates spectacle in order to control it and use her "desirable" status as performer to cover her subversive appropriation of the stage as writer/director. Not only does Suzy create multiple masks for herself; she also imposes masks on others. Nowhere is this more shocking than when she forces Raymond 's cousin Louis to assume Raymond's role. Freedman asks, "If we cannot figure without disfiguring, can we not put these disfiguring processes on stage by acknowledging their role in representation?" (176). Laberge not only acknowledges, but brutally insists on, the disfiguring process of figuration, with Suzy's chilling description of her (dis)figuring of Louis, who, as unwilling stand-in for Raymond, must go on in a kind of snuff show. Louis, like Raymond, dies several times: "massacred [.. .] the first time" (166) to provide a convenient, speechless, paralyzed stand-in, tortured by the gangsters for Raymond's betrayal of them and finally dying as "Raymond" of an overdose. Suzy disfigures Louis in order to tum him into the actor Louis who will play Raymond. The description of his make-up session is graphic and goes on for several pages: He didn't feel a thing: I had loaded him up with drugs.[.. .] The worst wasn't [pushing him downJ the stairs, it was before. Hitting him, and then his face.r, ..] Smashing someone's face in with brass knuckles. I don't know if you know, but it's not easy. I made it look like Willi had beat on you the way he'd have liked to. I hit him and hit him until I almost fell on top of him. I was dead. I wanted so much to make it look like Willi's work ... disgusting work. (160) I must say, Idid deslroy all his features: 20 stitches in his forehead, his eyes looked like they'd been sucked out of his head, his front teeth were smashed, one cheek, almost falling off, and thenhis nose was broken. Let's just say he wasn'tas cute as he was before. And then, Ihaven' t even told youabout his legs ... (164) Poor Louis is literally stagestruck. Brian Pocknell notes that the bar becomes a character in the play. Indeed, the entire play might be considered as a biography of the bar itself, as metaphor for the performance space: perhaps Cixous' "murder scene" is the intended victim all along. Pocknell shows that the character of the bar changes, as do the other characters in the play, with each deposition; we can CARA GARGANO see the characters of Agatha, Suzy, and Linda as avatars of the bar and the bar as representing the social matrix that gives birth to such characters. When Suzy speaks of burning the bar, she is not only destroying her past masks; she is also figuratively destroying the site of centuries of theatrical representation. The audience, seated at tables "in the bar," exists as part of the literal space of the theatre and will be destroyed as witnesses and as historical figures. Out of this dramaturgical holocaust, only Solange will be reborn, as a phoenix from the flames, wearing yet another mask. Laberge shows us the danger of accepting any mask at face value; when a community requires women to playa role, it can never be sure what is a mask and what is no1. Suzy reveals not only the ease with which women are manipulated onstage but also the possibility that women can tum the tables on that manipulation when they are no longer only actresses but also directors and playwrights. Suzy's project for revenge is violent and comprehensive: death of her former name/self, incarceration and drug dependency (living death) for Agathe (mother) and Linda (daughter), death of Raymond/Louis (father), death of the theatrical event, and finally, death of the theatrical site and its audience. Marvin Carlson shows that, after an initial social destabilization, the traditional thriller must reaffirm the cultural norm. For Carlson, what makes the conventional thriller "thrilling" is that it allows the audience to flirt with the danger of destabilization, secure in the knowledge that "the detective [...J demonstrates [... J [who l committed the destabilizing murder. The exposed murderer very often authenticates this account by confessing [...Jthe disorder that has entered the Edenic community is exposed and purged by the logical prowess of the savior detective, and a rational and benevolent order is restored" (183-84). Girard, too, assumes that sacrifice of the surrogate victim will lead to a restoration of hannony for, and a distancing of violence from, the community: Oedipus, in his role as sacrificial hero, functions not only as criminal but also as detective and savior. Laberge, however, refuses to allow the detective the last word (in fact a detective, as such, never appears onstage), and while the murderer "confess[esl" in some sense, this results not in a restoration of "rational and benevolent order" but rather in an installation of permanent disorder and the destabilization of traditional theatrical and social conventions. Suzy sacrifices the community rather than herself, using as her tools the very linguistic and cultural masks the community imposes on women. She sows disharmony and asks us to question what we see onstage and in life. The only thrill is the instability of our own identity as audience. Goffman points out that, onstage, we accept role-playing and mask wearing as entertaining, while offstage, we consider it dishonest; he distinguishes between stage "make-believe" and "everyday life," based on the presence of an audience for whom the performance is staged. In other words, he presumes "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 93 that an audience's presence is enough to ensure fictionality. Theatre, then, is necessarily a site of illusion, where the audience tacitly invites its own betrayal. More recently, Anne Ubersfeld has argued that the "pleasure of the spectator" derives from an oscillation between contradictory poles: the "pleasure of identification" and the "pleasure of critical distance" (134). For Ubersfeld , as for Aristotle, the theatre allows us to take pleasure in the transgression that occurs onstage. secure in the knowledge that, as audience, we are safe and that the onstage transgression will be punished. We enjoy the thrill of transgression , knowing that, like Girard's sacrificial hero, the actors will relieve us of responsibility. Laberge plays within this contradictory space, manipulating and blurring the differences between the theatrical and the social outlined by Goffman, destabilizing Ubersfeld's balance between identification and distance , and ultimately holding both the theatre and its audience accountable for its history. In Le Night Cap Bar, Laberge traps the audience in the theatrical site; she conflates the role of the audience as spectator with the role of the jury in a "real life" inquiry and makes pointed references to their specular complicity. Because the audience is locked within the liminal space of Ubersfeld's oscillation , it is both captured by the world of the play and aware of its vulnerability. Laberge's subversion of the differences between Goffman's reality and the theatrical construct and between "identification" and "distance," in Ubersfeld 's terms, resonates with Pocknell's observation that Laberge's work is "a theatre rooted in the familarity of daily life but which transcends the quotidian" (60). It is the disjunction and oscillation between mythical invraisemblance and western, kitchen-sink realism that makes the play so uncomfortably effective. While SaleHi notes that the juxtaposition of realism and illvraisemblallce calls attention to the symbolic level of the play, as well as to the mediatory nature of the playing space, for many critics, the combination of invraisemblance and realism presents a problem merely of inconsistency. Since Laberge foregrounds the question of audience expectation throughout the piece, challenging the very possibility of consistency in representation, this seems to be the point of the play. As Girard notes, "the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of equal gravity " (I); the play points to itself as a liminal site, where the temporality of everyday life can interface with the atemporal and the mythic. Ritual has the important social function of mediating this contradiction between theatre and everyday life and of purifying criminal violence and transfonning it into a sacred evcm, just as Greek tragedy offered audiences an experience that purged them of collective violence and left them ready 10 resume the established social pattern. On the one hand, as Saletti writes, Suzy gives us "dramaturgical proof that liberation from the past, from our origins, 94 CARA GARGANO from the father [...[ can only occur in a mediated space" (99). In this sense, Le Night Cap Bar performs Goffman's analogy between make-believe and everyday life; to perform an analogy is, in itself, a mythic act, comparable to what Mircea Eliade describes as an eternal return to the original story in order to change it in some way, and Le Night Cap Bar elevates a sordid story to a mythic level. On the other hand, by drawing attention to the play's theatricality , Laberge demystifies the mythic and allows the mythic to have a practical impact on the quotidian, with the feminine author emerging as a new power, with a capacity to affect both life and art. Just as Cixous later advocated appropriating the complicit nature of the staged event for feminist ends, Laberge, like many of her contemporaries, sees the theatre as a forum for social change. In an interview with Lucie Joubert, she calls it "a life event" (25) that carries with it important responsibilities. If the "murder scene" slips offstage and into OUf lives, it may do so in unexpected ways. Unlike Greek theatre, which sought to reaffirm the status quo, Laberge uses her play to transform the traditional sacrificial object into a new kind of heroic subject. Her female protagonist appropriates the sacrificial act and uses it to radically subvert traditional fonn and function, and the inconsistency and invraisemblallce of the play melt away when we transfer the work from the sordid level of everyday life to a truly mythic level. Like Girard's shamanic figure, Suzy not only survives her encounter with violence but is able to transform "bad" violence into "good" violence. She functions as pharmakon , both as a poison and as curative purge for outmoded social and theatrical conventions. In this sense , Laberge's "revenge" is more far-reaching than would be a vindication of her work through Parisian critical acclaim or what Dostie calls her "pleasure in violating certain taboos: that of writing a 'vulgar' thriller, and that of staging women who are 'bad' in this era when they are all supposed to be 'good'!" Le Night Cap Bar inverts Cixous' "murder scene" and stages a victorious murderess who destroys what Cixous calls "la fausse femme" ("Rire" 43), murders the "Father," and becomes both chthonic avenger and ruthless purifier. Gleefully unrepentant and every bit in control of her own destiny, this protagonist takes her revenge by playing with the very premises of western theatre: the distinction between stage and life, the mask of the female sacrificial object, and the inevitable punishment of onstage transgression to reestablish social hannony. Le Night Cap Bar rewrites Cixous' "murder scene" in a radical, mythopoetical paradigm shift, where the "Father" is ritually and variously sacrificed. The play oscillates between the "Father" of countless dramas who sacrifices his daughter and Suzy's relentless and repeated retaliation, what Blanca Navarro Pardifias calls, referring to L'Homme gris, "an act of legitimate self-defense" (I 18). Revenge in Le Night Cap Bar is more than a comprehensive vengeance for the traditional ways that the stage has been used; the play subverts both Aris- "Sweet Revenge" in Marie Laberge's Le Night Cap Bar 95 totelian structure and the standard thriller's reinstatement of the judicial stallIs quo. [t reminds us that the theatre can be seen as a series of masks that we may have to revise as we rewrite the faces of OUT culture. In this context, far from being a minor genre, the Labergian thriller becomes an act of revenge for Cixous' "murder scene" and a logical continuation of the process of feminine liberation and individuation that informs all Laberge's plays. NOTES I A version of this paper was delivered allhe Association for Canadian Theatre Research in Montreal. My thanks to the members of that session for their comments and especially to Joanne Tompkins and Jon Ciner for their continued assistance in developing this article. 2 "Apris avo;r ecrit de Ires belles texles a caractere social et psychologiqlle. voild qu'elle s'aventure dans Ie ,hriller poticier, domaillt plusfacilement abordable au cinema qu'ou theater lAfter having written some very lovely texts of a social and psychological nature, now she tries her hand at a police thriller, more appropriate to film rather than to the stageJ." All translations of primary and secondary sources are my own. 3 This was L'Homme gris, which received litlle appreciation at its MonLreal premiere in 1984 but had a subsequent spectacular success in Paris. 4 In Sophocles' play, the hero institutes a search for lhe murderer who has polluted his city only to discover that he himself is the culprit In his self-condemnation and exile, Oedipus becomes what Rene Girard refers to as a "surrogate victim," both exalted and debased, both the problem and its cure. See Girard 68-88. 5 Girard writes, "Like the animal and the infant [... ) the woman qualifies for sacrificial status by reason of her weakness and relatively marginal social status" (141-42). 6 Girard reminds us that Freud referred to the hero as " the primal father" (202). 7 In The Tongue Snatchers, Claudine Herrmann advocates snatching language in the same way that Cixous urges appropriation of the pen. In both cases, language is seen as a source of power over self and others. 8 It is entertaining to consider that Raymond's surname might be seen as a grotesque recasting of Girard's sacrificial hero (father) as Cixous' sacrificial object (little virgin or daughter). 9 I borrow the idea of "stepping out of the plot" from Marianne Hirsch, who uses the notion in The MOlherlDaughrer Plot to suggest the way a character might refuse to participate in a traditional narrative trope. Hirsch shows that frequently the only way for a female character to step out of the traditional narrative plot assigned to her is through "the closure of suicide" (65). Suzy's "suicide" is merely theatrical: it is the role of "Suzy Boivin" that dies so that the character Solange Rinfreue may live. 10 That the "Father's" death is a focus in this play is made more clear through CARA GARGANO Agathe's frequent references to her relationship with her own father and her sense of loss at his death. In fact, Agathe's father is linked to her conviction for Raymond 's murder, since Suzy uses an anecdote told to her by Raymond about Agathe's father to manufacture an ostensible "crime of passion." I I See Usmiani's article in Theatrum for more on the monologue in Quebec's drama. Usmiani suggests that "[tlhe monologue tradition in French Canada goes back to the turn of the century, with the 'recitation' and 'declamation' of selections from French or local authors" (15). She traces this tradition from Oratien Gelinas to Michel Tremblay, to whom Laberge is frequently compared. She also notes that "the monologue form lends itself particularly well to conveying a political message " (15). While Laberge's work has always had political overtones, in Le Night Cap Bar, her political agenda is embedded, not only in the quebecois language she uscs, but in her attack on the structures and narratives of traditional theatre. 12 See, for example, the collective La Nefdes sorcieres and Denise Boucher's Les Fees ont soif, among many others. In the 1976 preface to La Nefdes sorcieres, Nicole Brossard and France Theoret write that "!!}e monologue s'est impose cornme une evidence, une necessire [It became clear that the monologue as genre was imperative)" ( I I). Dialogue, they argue, is impossible because women have yet to find their own voices and the central core of the self from which to speak. "ReaJiste ou deliram, le monologue travaille dans Ie quotidien des perceptions. Au vifdu sujet. POllr etre par/antes er discours circulant, ii/aut auxfemmes enfreilldre la 10i,I'entendement social (Realistic or fanrastic,lhe monologue deals with observations ofdaily life. Goes to the very heart of the issues. To be a vocal participant in current discourse, women must violate the law. and social conventions)" ( 12 ). 13 De Lauretis suggests that Foucault's notion of a rhetoric of violence also suggests that "language [...J itself produces violence" (240). In this sense, a theatricallelling of violence might produce a cathartic experience akin to that engendered by ritual sacrifice. She also argues that "the representation of violence is inseparable from the notion of gender [...] in short, that violence is en-gendered in representation" (240). WORKS CITED Ackennan, Marianne. "Le Night Cap Bar a Minor Thriller That Tries to Be More." Rev. of Le Night Cap Bar, by Marie Laberge. Theatre de la manufacture at la licorne, Montreal. The Gazette 9 April 1987: E8. Annstrong, Nancy. and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Violence ofRepresentation: Literature and the History o/Violence. London: Routledge, 1989. Boucher. Denise. Les Fees ont SOl! 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