>>PREVIEW
THE DECEMBER MAN
Runs until March 4
Written by Colleen Murphy
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Colleen Murphy’s The December Man (L’homme de décembre) begins as a husband and wife asphyxiate themselves. Having prescheduled a neighbour’s arrival to ensure that their bodies will be found before decay sets in, and with the memory of their son’s suicide still aching, the two allow a gas leak to fill their home as they nod gently out of consciousness.
This is not tragedy.
For Murphy, true tragedy isn’t simply an academic question about classical traditions – a tragic flaw, pride (hubris) and inviolate fate – but a practical issue in an era of televised horror. Where Greek tragedy served an important function in providing catharsis (the release of negative emotions), she feels that though our fascination with tragic events continues, we no longer engage with them emotionally. In contemporary terms, British playwright Greg Bond once said of catharsis: "If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself." Like Hiroshima, and unlike the immediacy of theatre, television allows events and human beings to seem a world away.
"I think the media is interested in victims," says Murphy. "What they offer up is the victim, the crying woman, the screaming man, the weeping family. They offer victims to us so that we feel sad and awful but we feel safe, because it happened to them and not to us. So instead of it being tragedy, it’s ‘ain’t it awful.’ The whole notion of catharsis doesn’t happen."
In The December Man, the first of three mainstage productions for Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites festival, the reality of televised violence is realized in the most notorious Canadian shooting of all time. Centring on the private fallout of the December 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre, the play explores the impact of the shooting on the lives of a family directly affected by Marc Lépine’s multiple homicide – what Murphy calls "a footnote, not a headline."
Following a reversed chronology, the play begins by observing Jean’s parents, Kathleen and Benoît, as they deal with the death of their son, regressing through Jean’s own struggle with the guilt of his survival and inevitably backward to the day of the shooting itself. In this way, the play is essentially a dissection of grief, the literal opposite of a tragedy whose final moment is saddening only because of the connection established through a complete progression.
"I think if it were presented chronologically it would be banal and exploitative, because it would exploit the audience’s knowledge of what is inevitable," says Murphy. "Going back in time offers a different perspective on their profound struggle.
"Catharsis is something that has to be earned," she adds, "but in order to get there you have to go on the journey. "
In Greek tragedy, the journey is an inevitable one driven by fate, by the gods themselves. Characters’ struggles, then, are ultimately futile, their paths literally set for them. Certainly, each of The December Man’s characters struggles with the sense of their own helplessness, a sense of being caught in larger events not unlike fate. As one of the men separated from his female classmates before their murders, Jean feels a sense of failure for allowing Lépine to shoot his classmates, choosing to withdraw into himself. Kathleen and Benoît, on the other hand, are two lower-class Québécois watching as their hope for their only child’s education and the promise of a better life retreats, finally dying completely. And yet, even though each character perceives their own struggle as inevitable, Murphy insists that their paths still represent decisions rather than fated inevitabilities – internal decisions rather than courses set from on high.
"The biggest thing about trying to write about tragedy in the modern world is that you don’t have the gods," she says bluntly. "People are still saying, ‘so be it,’ ‘God willing,’ (but) I haven’t figured out how to use them."
As a playwright and filmmaker, currently serving as the playwright in residence at the University of Regina, Murphy has never shied away from the tragic, confessing that the macabre compels her as spectacle at least as much as it compels her to write. In her Beating Heart Cadaver, for example, a grief-stricken, paralyzed father literally clings to the last vestige of his deceased daughter: a balloon filled with her breath. Simply, she says, the tragic makes for compelling entertainment.
"We watch death on the news, sex on the Internet, we watch betrayal on the soap operas on prime time TV," says Murphy. "The Greeks, Euripides and his pals, they understood what compels people, the things that preoccupy us – the loss of our children, the loss of ourselves and eventually the loss of our world."
Currently working on a full-scale tragedy set in the Carthaginian Empire during the ascendance of Christianity titled Deliver Me, Murphy’s fascination with dark subject matter has not waned since Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre produced her first play, All Other Destinations are Cancelled, in 1987. What abides is a fascination with familial decay that The December Man exploits to full effect, finding the tragic, even in the absence of true tragedy. |
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