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by Claude Gauvreau, translated by Ray Ellenwood, directed by Adam Seelig

One Little Goat Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto

May 10-26, 2013

“Life Between the Sadist and the Earthbound Aviatrix”

One Little Goat, a theatre company specializing in poetic theatre, is currently giving The Charge of the Expormidable Moose its English-langauge premiere.  This is an important event on many counts.  The author Claude Gauvreau (1925-71) is now considered one of the giants of Québécois literature and The Charge of the Expormidable Moose (La Charge de l’orignal épormyable) is generally viewed as his masterpiece.   The play was written in 1956 but not performed until 1970 when it was deemed a failure.  It took two more decades for people to recognize Gauvreau’s genius leading to several important productions of the work in Quebec in the 1990s.  Ray Ellenwood translated it into English in 1996. 

Seeing Charge throws an entirely different light on Canadian theatre.  Not only do we seldom, if ever, see Canadian plays from the 1950s but those that we do see, like Bousille et les justes (1959 by Gratien Gélinas, are written in a firmly realistic style. Charge is written in the absurdist style of Gauvreau’s contemporary Eugène Ionesco and compares favourably with his best works.  We owe One Little Goat and director Adam Seelig a deep debt of gratitude for finally bringing Gauvreau’s play to the stage for the first time in English Canada.

It’s unfortunate to reveal anything of the plot since Gauvreau’s strategy is to thrust the audience into strange territory and it make its own sense of what it sees.  Yet, I regret I have to provide some hints of what happens simply to discuss the play.  The central character of the play is Mycroft Mixeudeim (Ben Irvine), a young man of remarkable strength and unpublished poet, who is still mourning the death of his beloved.  Mycroft’s four housemates unfortunately have become tired of his depression and pursue various methods to shock him out of it.  One habit Mycroft has developed is responding with alarm anytime he hears a woman scream and rushing to her aid by breaking through locked doors with his head.  This position with hands spread on either side of his head as he charges makes him the “expormidable moose” of the title.  Gauvreau was a sound poet and the text is filled from time to time with words you will not have heard before.  “Expormidable” is simply a quality that is beyond “formidable”. 

The four housemates hope that they can cure Mycroft’s depression by causing him to be attracted to one of the two female members – Laura Pa (Lindsey Clark) or Marie-Jeanne Commode (Jessica Salgueiro).  Whether the housemates are sincere in their efforts to “cure” Mycroft is cast in doubt by the fact that one of them, Lontil-Déparey (David Christo) has begun plagiarizing Mycroft’s unpublished work with hopes of publishing it himself.  At least Becket-Bobo (Lindsay Owen Pierre), the housemate who dutifully locks and unlocks the five doors to the house, seems to have no ulterior motives. 

The housemates’ experiments on Mycroft to determine his personality disorder, and thence to find a treatment, reach an impasse in Act 1 when the sudden appearance of the aviatrix Dydrame Daduve (Sochi Fried), whose helicopter has crashed, suggests the plot will take a new turn.  One can only wonder whether Gauvreau knew of Shaw’s comedy Misalliance (1910) where the sudden arrival of an aviatrix after a crash also seems sure to resolve the impasse of the society she enters.  In Act 2 the hope that the arrival of Dydrame Daduve seems to promise is countered by the arrival of Lontil-Déparey’s mentor, the unashamed sadist Letasse Cromagnon (Hume Baugh).  The question of which of the two new arrivals will dominate in determining the fate of Mycroft becomes the crux of Act 2 and the primary indicator of Gauvreau’s view of society.

Some summaries of the play that one can find claim that the play is about how one man in an asylum is being evaluated and intentionally mistreated by four psychiatrists.  This is a terribly reductive way of looking at the play and it is fortunate that director Adam Seelig has taken a different approach.  Emphasizing that Mycroft lives with four other people and that they are only his housemates helps connect the play to the motif Northrop Frye observed in Canadian drama that he called the “garrison mentality”.  As in Gélinas’ Bousille et les justes or Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs (1968), a family or a group of one’s peers can turn on the one whose knowledge, ability or good fortune threaten to overturn the status quo.  So in Charge, Mycroft’s melancholy sets him apart from his peers which in turn causes them to resent and try to eliminate this difference.  It is probably no accident that Gauvreau names his main character after Sherlock Holmes’s brother who is even smarter than the great detective.  What is so exciting about Charge is to see this archetypal theme of Canadian drama embodied so early on and in terms undisguised by the requirements of realist drama.  As the theme is elaborated in Act 2, I couldn’t help but think that all of Canadian drama could be viewed as the struggle of the individual between the sadist on one side and the earthbound aviatrix on the other.  The first bends others to his will and destroys their own.  The second helps others find their identity but cannot give them freedom. 

The production features an extraordinary performance by Ben Irvine as Mycroft.  The role is not only physically punishing but demands a tour de force of acting.  In the dinner party in Act 1, each of the housemates puts a different psychotropic drug in Mycroft’s food, each drug radically altering his behaviour from hysterical to lethargic.  Irvine is hilarious in this section as each new drug takes effect and shows his expertise in mime when the fourth drug causes a series of bizarre effects such as “Mycroft Mixeudeim mimes the gestures of a Turkish dancer, and then his impression of a threshing machine”.  Irvine draws our sympathy by clearly conveying the gentleness that underlies Mycroft’s physical strength and the essential innocence that underlies all the peculiar behaviour he is forced into.

Among the housemates, only Lontil-Déparey seems to have deliberately negative agenda.  David Christo coveys this with a smooth voice suggests manipulation beneath its reassurance.  Christo should, however, project to the same level as the other three and enunciate more clearly.  Lindsey Clark’s Laura Pa (a pun, perhaps, on the French “l’aura pas” – “he will not have it”) is, in contrast, the most sympathetic of the four to Mycroft’s plight.  We sense that she would be happy to be his girlfriend if only he could stop grieving for his dead beloved. 

Jessica Salgueiro and Lindsay Owen Pierre plays the two housemates who seem to approach Mycroft in the most objective way.  Salgueiro gives us the sense that Marie-Jeanne Commode has uncomfortably resigned herself to Mycroft’s supposed preference for Laura Pa.  Pierre is highly effective as the most stable, rational and well-spoken of the bunch.  Therefore it is disappointing when we see that his character, too, gets caught up in the excitement of analyzing Mycroft’s mental state through drugs without seeing the logical fallacy behind the experiment.

Designer Jackie Chau has created a five-doored wall of bright pastels suggesting a cheerfulness that deliberately contrasts with the increasingly dark nature of the play.  She picks up on the influence of Surrealism on Gauvreau’s work by portraying the keys-cum-doorhandles to the doors as hands.  Nature as represented by green branches is pressed up against plexiglass sheets on both side of the stage and above as if it is intentionally being forced out.  She has Mycroft barefoot in a short-sleeved shirt and rolled-up pants as if he were being set to work.  This places him in contrast with the four housemates clad in jaunty sportswear with sweatbands as if they were just about to play tennis.  They are, of course, dressed to play games.  These are mindgames, however, rather than any wholesome sports.  Chau has invented a whimsical gown for Dydrame Daduve that looks rather like a parachute rethought as haute couture.  Letasse Cromagnon, in contrast, as the most repressive character on stage, wears hard shoes, dark pants, dark coach’s jacket, tie and whistle, to link him to the captains of business who rule the world.  Mycroft periodically speaks to himself through a confessional screen that descends from the ceiling.  The situation already conveys an implicit satire on religion, but Chau heightens it by having the doors to the screen exactly reflect the central door with hands as handles of the set.  

As we have seen in other productions from One Little Goat, Adam Seelig’s direction combines a delightful sense of playfulness with intellectual incisiveness.  For anyone interested in the history of Canadian drama, Charge is a production not to be missed.  One hopes that the exposure the play will receive in this insightful production will lead to the play being included in the study of Canadian drama on a regular basis.  As Canada’s finest example of absurdist drama one also hopes this production will encourage its inclusion in studies of that movement.  But more than these academic interests, the play is fascinating in its own right.  Gauvreau’s works are known to have influenced Robert Lepage and The Four Horsemen group of performance poets.  Knowledge of Gauvreau himself in English Canada is long overdue. Charge makes me wish to see other of his plays.  But for the moment, we have to celebrate the long-delayed charge of the Expormidable Moose onto the English-speaking stage at last.    

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (top) Jessica Salgueiro, David Christo, Ben Irvine, Lindsay Owen Pierre and Lindsey Clark; middle) Sochi Fried and Ben Irvine.  ©2013 Yuri Dojc.

For tickets, visit http://onelittlegoat.org.