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by Olivier Choinière, translated by Caryl Churchill, directed by Steven McCarthy

Candles Are For Burning, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

March 29-April 8, 2012

“The Power of Love”

If you feel like having your mind truly boggled in only 70 minutes, go see Bliss, now playing at Buddies in Bad Times.  Québécois playwright Olivier Choinière takes you on a journey into the mind of Céline Dion’s “biggest fan” and the borderline quasi-religious insanity that is celebrity worship.  At first glance, you may wonder why a playwright of the stature of Caryl Churchill would translate a play by a Québécois writer whom we in English-speaking Canada have never heard of.  The answer becomes clear during the show.  Like Churchill’s own plays Cloud 9 (1979) or Top Girls (1982), Bliss deals with questions of identity, particularly female identity, and power.         

Bliss (Félicité in the original) from 2007 falls into the category of many recent plays, like Churchill’s own A Number (2002), where the audience is given the task of having to determine relation of the actors to the story they are telling.  We see four actors all in Wal-Mart uniforms.  Three (Jean Robert Bourdage, Trent Pardy and France Rolland) stand on James Lavoie’s square white-tiled set with a shabby bed on a dais behind with is an extreme close-up of Céline Dion’s face.  The fourth (Delphine Bienvenu) remains on the black area surrounding the white-tiled square and, unlike the other three, uses a corded microphone to speak her lines.  The three actors on the set narrate the strange tale in choral fashion, each taking turns in speaking lines or even individual words.  The woman with the mic seems to prompt or correct the chorus about minute details of the story.  While we become completely absorbed by the chorus’s increasing bizarre tale, we also increasing wonder what precisely the relation is between the woman with the mic and the chorus.  We do find out by the end but only after the story takes some extraordinary twists and turns.

The play begins with the chorus in the throes of ecstasy after a Céline Dion concert.  They speak as if they were the three shepherd children of Fátima who have just seen the Virgin Mary.  Everything about Céline is perfect and blazes light.  She may speak or sing to a group but it feels as if she were speaking or singing directly and only to each one of them.  They weep for joy at seeing her and she weeps to see their joy.  But she has to leave them to fly to Las Vegas in her private jet, the “Céline”.  Like a deity she selects two people to join her--the photographer (Pardy) who could not take a photo because of his tears and a journalist (Rolland) whom she automatically makes her personal biographer. 

At this point, once they chorus begins to describe events outside their immediate experience, we should begin to suspect something strange is happening to the narrative.  Yet, we brush these doubts away assuming that the perhaps the show is meant to be a satirical fairy tale.  It turns out that Céline is pregnant and told by her Californian doctor (Bourdage) never to leave bed until she’s ready to give birth.  To use up her free time, Céline decides to read the mountains of fan mails she has neglected.  One letter strikes her in particular.  It is from a girl named Isabelle in Sherbrooke, who is confined to bed because of a debilitating illness.  It is only through listening to Céline’s music that she has been able to endure the pain. 

Céline wants to contact this poor girl, but her own health takes a sudden and dangerous turn for the worse and Céline’s parents (Bourdage and Rolland) and brother (Pardy) are summoned to her palatial Las Vegas home.  When the three are alone, they get into a strange unmotivated altercation that turns violent.  Are these three, then really Céline’s parents and brother?

Meanwhile a girl named Isabelle--based on the case of Isabelle Cote (1981-2002)-- is admitted to a Sherbrooke hospital.  She had been raped and beaten by her father and kept chained to her bed by her parents and brother for 17 years.  In hospital her stomach continues to grow ever larger and inside is a voice that says its name is “Caro”.

Caro, as it happens, is also the name of one of the four Wal-Mart employees, the one with the mic, who claims she is Céline’s biggest fan.  She feels she has been given a special power to see into the lives of others and sees meaning in the fact that her name plus her worker’s number when spelled backwards looks like “oracle”.  She is despised by two of her co-workers (Pardy and Rolland) for her zombie-like behaviour and by her boss (Bourdage) for not working. 

What is the relation of the stories of Céline, Isabelle and Caro?   That is the essential mystery of the play and our having to readjust our assessment of old information in light of new is what keeps us immersed in the action.  We know there must be a connection beyond the coincidence of names--and there is. 

Like Churchill, beneath the hilarity and grotesquerie of the events, Choinière presents a strong undercurrent of social criticism.  If Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses”, Choinière demonstrates that celebrity worship now serves the same function.  Celebrity worship reinforces the myth that anyone can succeed and that excess of wealth is its just reward.  Worshipping those who a famous for talent--or increasing today, famous simply for being famous--removes any incentive to change the status quo that has allowed these objects of veneration to exist.  Celebrity worship is truly an opiate since it represses the expression of an individual identity by emphasizing that identity derives from a the relationship of fan to star.  This has economic implications since this supposed “relationship” is manifest principally by the fan purchasing commodities produced by or associated with the star.   

The chorus of Bliss truly works as a team and none can be singled out since they work so perfectly both in concert and in taking on the various identities the narrative assigns them.  Delphine Bienvenu is suitably stern and forbidding as Caro but also conveys a sense of manic obsession in her corrections of the chorus. 

Bliss is plumbs a popular topic and discovers something deeply disturbing there.  His play ultimately moves beyond satire to warning.  Its form return to its origins of ancient drama itself in the separation of a lone actor from a chorus who chanted narrative dithyrambs.  Choinière thus ironically uses a form credited with the emerged of the individual in drama for a tale about the submergence of the individual in celebrity worship or in serial abuse.  It’s too bad that it took the notice of a famous playwright to make us aware of a great play written by a Canadian.  But at least in this case Churchill’s celebrity has had a positive effect.  For theatre fans, Bliss, despite its darkness, really does live up to its name.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Trent Pardy, Jean Robert Bourdage and France Rolland. Photo ©2012 Jeff Mann.

For tickets, visit www.buddiesinbadtimes.com.