Drama

Drama publication in 2007 was dominated by plays dealing with the past, a category that includes three of the five finalists for the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. Four of those finalists are included in this year’s review package: The December Man (L’homme de décembre) by Colleen Murphy, What Lies before Us by Morris Panych, The Bombay Plays by Anosh Irani, and In Gabriel’s Kitchen by Salvatore Antonio. The fifth, Rosa Laborde’s Leo, about Chile’s desaparecidos, was reviewed in ‘Drama 2006.’ The winner, The December Man (L’homme de décembre) is the strongest play in a fairly weak field.

Murphy’s play shows the impact on a working-class Montreal family of the murders at L’école polytechnique on 6 December 1989. The son, Jean Fournier, is one of the young men ordered out of the lecture hall by Marc Lépine before he killed fourteen female students. Jean cannot overcome his feelings of guilt and inadequacy for being unable to help these women. Haunted by their deaths and his helplessness, he commits suicide sixteen months later. Approximately a year after that, his devastated parents, Kate and Benoît, also kill themselves. These painful events are presented in reverse chronological order, so that the play begins with the parents’ suicide and concludes on the evening of the massacre with Kate’s ironic assurance to the traumatized Jean, ‘you’re safe.’

The action takes place in a single setting: the Fourniers’ ‘very modest’ living room, which, along with its furnishings, embodies the changing emotional states of its inhabitants. One item has particular significance: an architectural model Jean is constructing for a class design project. The way that this object acquires symbolic weight exemplifies how the reverse order of the scenes contributes to the play’s meaning. In the first scene, the model sits on a side table, ‘dusty, and held together with masking tape’; as we move backwards in time, we see Kate smash it in frustration and despair after an argument with Benoît over the cemetery chosen for Jean’s burial. But, like Jean, the model was already damaged: in the scene set one year after the massacre, it is ‘leaning noticeably to one side as if the load it bears is either imbalanced or too heavy.’ In the final scene we see its ‘first incarnation’: ‘a meticulous model, an austere miniature skeletal frame for a tall, ultra modern building,’ an image of the promise that is about to be destroyed by the eruption of tragedy into the family’s lives.

The play is carefully crafted, built up not only from convincingly banal naturalistic dialogue and minutely stipulated staging details, but also from sometimes surreal verbal image patterns, among them mental pictures, fantasies, and nightmares, and the winter and Christmas imagery that underpin the title. The play’s tight focus contributes to its emotional intensity, but the work’s possibilities and resonance are ultimately constrained by the severe limitations of its adult characters. While Jean’s reactions are both idiosyncratic and moving, Kate in particular is so ill-equipped to deal with the catastrophe that overtakes her family that the play becomes a study of an impoverished personality as much as it is an exploration of the impact of a public event on obscure individuals.

Panych’s What Lies Before Us is set in 1885, during the survey of the Rocky Mountains prior to the building of the transnational railroad. The jacket copy identifies the play as a version of Waiting for Godot. It shares with Beckett’s play two incompatible, static male characters trapped in an inhospitable environment, waiting to meet someone who never arrives. In this case, the men are land surveyors laying out the route for the railroad, stuck in a tent somewhere in the Rockies, waiting to meet the Major, their American boss. Keating is an Englishman, a brainless, pompous imperialist; Ambrose is an educated, acerbic, cynical Scot. They are attended by their Chinese servant, Wing, who has some characteristics in common with Beckett’s Lucky, notably his abject position and his silence, broken by...