<b>✭✭</b>✩✩✩
<b>by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek & Bill Glassco, directed by Weyni Mengesha
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 10-September 24, 2011
</b>
Although I never saw the classic 1974 production of <i>Hosanna</i> starring Richard Monette, former Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, I have seen two previous productions of the play since 2001. Stratford’s first-ever production of the Michel Tremblay classic has the greatest production values of the three but is otherwise lacking in almost every other way. Strangely, this is the first time the play struck me more as an historical artifact than as a living drama.
The story of drag queen Claude Lemieux know as Hosanna and Raymond Bolduc, known as Cuirette, his live-in biker boyfriend of four years, still has the potential to be relevant. The effeminate Hosanna has a job as a hairdresser but is the household’s breadwinner, while the butch Cuirette, who has given up painting, lives off Hosanna’s income. In terms of the social construction of gender roles, who is the “husband” and who is the “wife”? Hosanna also has his own internal crisis. Elizabeth Taylor has been his inspiration from early youth on. His appearance at a Halloween party as Taylor dressed for her entrance into Rome as Cleopatra was to signal his triumph over all the other drag queens of Montreal. Instead, in has turned into cruel fiasco planned, with Cuirette’s complicity, publicly to humiliate Hosanna. The disaster causes Hosanna to question his own identity. As a gay transvestite, is he a man or a woman? The terms of this question now seem hopelessly dated, but they are how this man at that time formulates his dilemma.
Linked to Hosanna’s dilemma is an allegory about Quebec’s role within Canada and Canada’s role in North America. What does it mean that a farm boy from St. Eustache should take an American movie star in a grandiose Hollywood epic as his model? It reflects the cultural colonization of Quebec by the anglophone world and of Canada by American popular culture. Tremblay views Hosanna’s humiliation as a painful but positive awakening.
Yet, the play is still a domestic drama rather like <i>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i> where we follow a couple through a harrowing night when one of them must confront the loss of her illusions. Director Weyni Mengesha seems to have no grip on this aspect of the ply at all. Although the action begins with the furious and mortified Hosanna arriving home soon followed by Cuirette, Gareth Potter as Hosanna gives no indication of the devastation Hosanna is supposed to be feeling. His prime worry really does seem to be unhooking his dress rather than using that as a symptom of greater frustration. For his part, Oliver Becker as Cuirette seems altogether too jolly even though he should be cringing that Hosanna will think that he betrayed him. As a result the first act that should boil over with tension, has none. It’s played rather more like a foul-mouthed domestic comedy. The tension of Act 1 should lead us to seek its cause and hang on every word of Hosanna’s long Act 2 monologue of explanation. Yet, without an adequate build-up, the monologue takes on more a comic than tragic dimension. Hosanna’s drag queen world is small, constrained and petty, but that does not mean a person who has fought to be in it cannot suffer exclusion from it.
Potter gives a competent performance but without the highs and lows other have found in the role. He is far better at playing Hosanna as catty rather than truly emotional. Crucially, Mengesha doesn’t encourage him to invest his wicked humour with a sense of self-loathing essential for his transformation at the dénouement. Becker makes quite a likeable Cuirette oddly devoid of menace. Behind his harsh words and deeds we should sense a real love that may have motivated him to help purge Hosanna of his vanity. As it is, the two seems much more like annoyed roommates than quarelling lovers.
Michael Gianfrancesco has created a gloriously slovenly set for Hosanna’s one-room apartment, littered with all sorts of period details--vinyl records, a rectangular cradle phone, a boxy television set--that seemed to provoke much nostalgia in the audience for the 1970s. Dana Osborne’s costume for Hosanna as Cleopatra verged on looking too expensive to be home-made and not at all as tawdry as it is described. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting is effective in altering mood and in changing perspective as in the important transition from drama to monologue and back in Act 2.
One senses that Mengesha is out of sympathy with the material and cannot make us or the actors perceive the all-or-nothing stakes Hosanna sees in her plight. This lack of passion is what turns the play into merely a curious slice of 1970s gay life in Montreal rather than an involving drama.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Gareth Potter as Hosanna. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.luminato.com">www.stratfordfestival.ca</a>.
<b>2011-08-11</b>
<b>Hosanna</b>