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created and directed by Qui Va Là

Qui Va Là, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto

May 6-16, 2013

“Freedom from Home or Homelessness”

La Fugue, the innovative show that has just opened at Young People’s Theatre, is a harder hitting play about teen runaways than many plays on the subject aimed at adult audiences.  Told without words and combining puppetry and mime with music from grunge to rap to J.S. Bach, provides a stylized but visceral experience that can’t be summed up in a simple message.  In that way the production recommended for Grades 8 to 12 serves to stimulate thought and discussion in a way that theatre for adults too often avoids.

The play concerns a teen named Yohan who has run away from home.  (Names are signalled by a placard crossing the stage on a clothesline.)  At home there is only his father, Papa (Justin Laramée), who after the music session that begins the play, receives a cardboard box from the police that contains some items that belong to Yohan – a parka, an MP3 player and a large sketchpad with drawings – and some items Papa doesn’t recognize – a girl’s parka and purse.  Flipping through the drawings on the sketchpad, Papa sees the reason why Yohan left home.   The pictures show Papa with an angry, gaping mouth.  In succession the pictures move into a close-up of the mouth with Yohan in his parka about to be swallowed up.  The last in the series shows the exterior of a house cracked down the middle with Papa in one window and Mama, we presume, in the other.

The title La Fugue has a double meaning in French.  On the one hand, “faire la fugue” means to run away from home.  On the other it refers to the one piece of music on Yohan’s MP3 playlists that is not modern – one of the Preludes and Fugues of J.S. Bach.  When Papa listens to it, we realize that for him as for Yohan it serves as an island of calm in a turbulent world. 

Typical of the show is the linking of on-stage images.  The box that Papa has just opened immediately becomes the piece of cardboard that Yohan in sitting on as he begs for spare change somewhere in a big city.  Yohan is played as a bunraku-style puppet with a puppeteer (Félix Beaulieu-Duchesneau) taking on the omozukai role by manipulating the hood of Yohan’s parka and his right arm, his own hand becoming Yohan’s right hand.  The moving, but faceless parka thus becomes a universal figure representing every child who has ever run away from home.

When Papa re-examines the female parka and then looks again at Yohan’s sketchpad he finds illustrations of their story that then comes alive before us.  Philippe Racine manipulates the girl’s parka in the same bunraku style and we see that she is Noémie, the girl Yohan has fallen in love with.  She stands about looking as if she is waiting for someone. Just from Racine’s manipulation an adult audience would realize that she is probably a prostitute, a point that perhaps would escape the notice of a teen audience.  When she sitting beside Yohan and not looking, Yohan goes through her purse and finds white powder in a plastic bag.  Again, the adults will know what is suggested, but the teens audience perhaps will not.  In fact, at the Q&A session after the show it was clear that not all the audience understood what Noémie was carrying. 

The most significant transformation of images occurs when we find out more of the life of Yohan and Noémie and Justin Laramée puts on a parka to become Wolf, the leader of the gang that Noémie belongs to.  We can tell because they all, except Yohan, wear a red bandana around one arm.  As reward for her work, Wolf gives Noémie some of the powder and forces her to wash it down with alcohol.  When she passes out, Wolf and a comrade beat up Yohan to the accompaniment of wild percussion played by Benoît Côté before Yohan, too, receives a red armband. 

Qui Va Là has thus underscored the irony of lives of runaways in a more powerful way that I have ever seen before.  When Papa morphs into Wolf , we see that Yohan has fled his unhappy family life only to join the unhappy family of a gang.  He has run away from one aggressive authority figure only to put himself in the hands of another, more dangerous one.  As the troupe confirmed during the Q&A session, they put this irony to music in a rap song using syllables of the four characters’ names so that we hear, “Noémie, Yohan Noémie, Wolf-an-émie” which evoke the a combination of English and Spanish in a conflict over who of the characters is an enemy or no enemy.  

The 45-minute-long piece closes with Papa hanging up Yohan’s parka and then Noémie’s on the clothesline.  Then he adds two “Missing Child” posters as pulls the parks along the front.  We think these two are simply for Yohan and Noémie, but when he adds one after another until the entire stage-wide line is full, we are reminded chillingly that La Fugue is not simply about only two teen characters.  Laramée’s face in contemplating the spotlit parks of Yohan and Noémie shows the depth of both his remorse and longing.         

Before this ending, in a brilliant scene two of the cast roll the sleeping bag that Yohan and Noémie have been using for warmth into a long tube and then manipulate it as if it were a caterpillar.  When the caterpillar crosses the X-shaped opened box, both rise and we see it as a butterfly – one of the central emblems in Yohan’s drawings.  By the end of the show it is completely unclear whether Yohan and Noémie are alive or dead.  Running away from home has caused a transformation but what kind of transformation is uncertain.  Is it freedom from the confines of home or has it become freedom from life?

It is amazing how Qui Va Là can evoke such essential questions in so short a time with such simple means.  Too many plays for young people, and indeed plays for adults, feel obliged to articulate their meaning at the end as if attention to the subject matter is meant to end with the end of the play.  In contrast, La Fugue gives both adults and teens a surprisingly unsettling experience that naturally provokes reflection and debate not merely about runaways but about the use and misuse of authority and the possibilities or lack thereof for freedom and autonomy.  La Fugue is a performance piece adults should seek out as well as teens.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Félix Beaulieu-Duchesneau, Justin Laramée and Philippe Racine.  ©2012 Jacques Cabana.

For tickets, visit http://youngpeoplestheatre.ca.