Je me souviens: De Onderneming in Montreal

Paris may be the City of Light, but Montreal, her cousin across the Atlantic, is the City of Theater. There is no central theater district on Canada's French-speaking island. Instead, performance spaces dot every nook and cranny of the landscape, turning up in cozy neighborhoods and trendy arts districts. Theaters can be found in places obvious (the classical Monument National is downtown, an old jewel in the midst of strip-club row) and odd (Espace Geordie sits on the first floor of an office building amid residential duplexes). Each May, Montreal throws open all doors big and small, hosting the best of the international stages. This theater open house alternates annually between the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques and the Théâtres du Monde. The "des Amériques" festival is larger, with more shows and a longer schedule. Théâtres du Monde is more intimate, 2002 welcoming five productions in 2002: one each from Italy, Quebec, and Germany, and two from Belgium.

At the heart of this year's program was the one-night-only, back-to-back performance of both festival contributions from the Flemish De Onderneming company: The Notebook and The Proof. Based on Agota Kristof's intricately woven trio of novels, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie, De Onderneming laced together the entire saga, allowing a leisurely dinner break between the plays. The company occupied the Montreal venue Usine C, which was once a factory. Now a performance space, from the outside it still resembles an imposing industrial hub. Inside, however, the space is cool and open. The lobby boasts a blend of white walls, black doors, full-length windows, and metallic trim. Rocks line the exterior walkways, and cloth-draped chairs haunt interior corners. There are no corridors, just vast open space for congregation and contemplation. Both rustic and hypermodern, the space is like a Zen garden. In the auditorium, the floor is black, the walls brick, and the seating raked. There is neither proscenium arch nor curtain; everything is utterly simple, providing perfectly bare pages for De Onderneming's composition.

The company feeds on the kind of simplicity found at Usine C, a combination of minimalism and sprawl. Their aesthetic is spare, their ambition epic. At the core of De Onderneming, the product of the 1996 union of three Flemish performance companies, are four artists who do everything from adaptation to staging to acting. A true collective, they function without an artistic director. They choose difficult texts as muses; recent projects include works by Oscar Wilde, Witold Gombrowicz, Marcel Pagnol, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marguerite Duras, as well as contemporary Flemish writers. In the process of adaptation, De Onderneming explodes their sources yet at the same time pares them down, using minimal props, scenery, and technology to tell far-reaching stories. At home in Hoboken, a city in Flanders, they perform in their resident space—a former bonbon factory—and on the street. The company's name reflects both their goals and the totality of their method: "De Onderneming" means "The Enterprise."

Even daring to approach Kristof's triptych indicates an enterprising ambition. Kristof is a novelist obsessed with truth and memory. She sets her explorations against the ever- present backdrop of war. Like De Onderneming, her scope is sprawling, but her words are short and simple. After growing up in Hungary, Kristof fled to Switzerland when Russian tanks entered Budapest in 1956. In exile, she earned money working in a watch factory; her prose echoes the measured, precise ticking of the timepieces that surrounded her. Yet, in the world of her writing, sequence and progression are not always as linear or reliable as clockwork. In The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie—her "twins trilogy"—she shifts amongnarrators, times, and countries. Language is also shifted—Kristof writes in her second tongue, French, avoiding her native Hungarian. When she wrote the last novel of the series, she purposefully called into question all that came...