REVIEW
FOR THE PLEASURE OF SEEING HER AGAIN
Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until November 3
Martha Cohen Theatre (CPA)
The pleasure is all ours
Michel Tremblay's tribute to his mother is sentimentally delightful
Michel Tremblay has a well-known penchant for using his family, friends and neighbours as models for characters in his plays, but For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is his most sincerely biographical. Of course, the 1998 play is necessarily autobiography too, but mostly it’s a sentimental ode to his mother, to whom he says he owes everything he is. She died before the Québécois playwright became internationally known, and this was his opportunity to thank her encore une fois, si vous permettez, as the original title says.
The play consists of five vignettes during which the narrator guides us and Nana speaks for herself – in delightfully colourful detail, meticulously translated by Linda Gaboriau to maintain not just the sense but the rhythm of the original text. Beginning when Nana’s young son is caught throwing chunks of ice in front of cars – and she’s forced to berate him – until her death from cancer as he’s on the cusp of a brilliant career, she’s a font of folk wisdom and elaborate stories. Some of them are true, some not, but they’re the foundation for the young writer’s career, as he tells her directly.
"I’m melodramatic too, Ma, I love getting carried away in the long monologues I make up," he says as she is looking back on her life, "and just like you, I’m willing to make fun of everything to avoid facing reality! It’s not a weakness, Ma, it’s a strength...."
Sharon Bakker as Nana is indeed the universal mother, mercurial in her shifts from joy to anger, but always palpably proud of her son. Her on-and-off accented delivery is at first disconcerting, but eventually blends into the seamless stream of narrative provided by her Saskatchewan-born Montrealer character. David LeReaney is a smooth foil for her often frantic monologues, offering a wry backdrop to her confabulations, and director Gail Hanrahan has led the pair to explore some simple but effective elaborations on the characters Tremblay has written.
The characterization rings true and complex, allowing Nana’s power and wit to emerge gradually in her comic tales. As she becomes ill, Tremblay creates an over-the-top exit well suited to his mother, who loved everything theatrical, but didn’t live to see her son "on the other side." It’s a bit of an awkward transition as the play self-referentially reveals itself as a product of the stage, but one imagines that if his characterization is true, Nana would have loved it. |
