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by Jennifer Tremblay, translated by Shelley Tepperman, directed by Megan Follows

Nightwood Theatre, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

March 13-30, 2014

Woman: “The destiny of the mother is the past of the daughter”

Jennifer Tremblay’s second play, The Carousel (Le Carrousel) published in 2011 is the sequel to her first play The List (La Liste) published in 2007 that won the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 2008.  The sole character in both récits théâtrals, as she calls them, is an unnamed Woman, but the warm vital Woman in The Carousel is so different from the neurotically obsessive Woman in The List that the two seem to be completely different people and The Carousel can safely be enjoyed with no knowledge of the previous play.  While the main problem of The List was the sheer improbability of its premise, the main problems with The Carousel are its internal contradictions and its promotion of antique values.  Fortunately, the central role allows Allegra Fulton to give a virtuoso performance.

In The Carousel the Woman learns that her mother Florence is dying and has to leave her two sons to travel to the hospital in the town where she was born somewhere along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.  While waiting in the hospital to see Florence, the Woman thinks back to various times in her life that involved driving along Route 138.  Her memories are interspersed with prayers to her deceased maternal grandmother Marie sometimes asking for guidance, sometimes asking to know the answer to the question she has always wondered about.  Why did Marie allow all of her sons to stay at home but send Florence away to a convent school?

Reflecting the play’s attempt at a stream-of-consciousness style, the Woman re-enacts scene after scene not just from her from her own past, but from those of Florence and Marie.  A scene involving Florence and her father Charlie, can easily dissolve into one between the Woman and her sons or between the Woman as a child and her grandfather Émilien.  Allegra Fulton demonstrates her great talent in keeping all the voices of the many characters, male and female, including the Woman and Florence at different ages, completely distinct.  Whatever confusions arise have to do with Tremblay’s text rather than Fulton’s performance.  This is because Tremblay’s stream-of-consciousness does not always flow smoothly from one similar idea to the next as in James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.  Rather it just as often hopscotches about, leaping from one scene to the next without any clear connection between them.  This may reflect the Woman’s agitated state but it also makes her thoughts at times hard to follow. 

Surprising for a play written in the 21st century are the ancient models of male and female roles that Tremblay puts forward as universal.  A refrain throughout the action is that women stay but men never do.  The most a woman can hope for is that they come back “often”.  At the ever end the Woman concludes that men are really little boys who like to go away and have adventures and that women are really scared little girls hiding at home.  Two aspects of this conclusion are bizarre.  First is that it is so incredibly old fashioned.  Tremblay strives for universal symbolism but why does it require women to stay at home?  Second is that the Woman’s story itself does not support this conclusion.  The problem in Marie’s home is not that her farmer husband Émilien goes away, but that he does not.  He looks for sexual pleasure too close to home which is his great failing.  The Woman’s question about Marie is that she does not stay home but is sent away.   

Yet Tremblay has no praise for men who go away either, even if, as she claims, it is their nature.  Florence’s husband Charlie goes away to look for pleasure elsewhere, but Florence and the Woman see this as a failing, too.  Yet, when the Woman decides to have a sexual liaison outside of marriage, Tremblay does not condemn her but the male object of the Woman’s desire who does not desire her.  Out of frustration, the Woman goes back to her house and chops down a tree – a rather too obvious form of Freudian revenge that evoked much unintentional laughter.

After hearing 75 minutes of fragments of the Woman’s life, we can be excused for feeling confused because Tremblay’s point of view on the action is itself confused.  What she hopes to illustrate is the cycle of life, or, as Tremblay puts it is her pseudo-profound manner: “The destiny of the mother is the past of the daughter.  The destiny of the daughter is the future of the mother.  And vice versa.”  The “vice versa” at the end simply makes nonsense of what came before.  Tremblay’s image for the cycle of life is none other than the carousel that the Woman’s sons rode in a park in Paris.  Thus Tremblay sums up all the action in the play – both the repetitions in family history and the circular mediations on that history – with a cliché.  In 1907 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his famous poem “Das Karussell” about exactly the same carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg with its elephant that Tremblay mentions and uses it to symbolize the cycle of life.  The amusement park ride carries the same symbolism in the ballet of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel (1945), in the imagery of J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) and in the song “On the Carousel” (1967) by The Hollies.

First-time director Megan Follows has decided that Tremblay’s words are not enough.  Therefore, on the long white wall of Denise Karn’s sterile hospital set, she has Karns project images that arise in the text – the iron gate of the convent school, church windows, old-fashioned wallpaper for Marie’s house, a dense forest, passing headlights for Route 138.  Sometimes the images match what the Woman is saying, but sometimes the Woman shifts from one setting to another so rapidly that the lingering presence of a projection is unhelpful.  These attempts to amplify the text suggest that the words are not powerful enough on their own to inspire our imagination.

If Tremblay’s collections of scenes results only in clichés, the same is not true of Fulton’s fantastic performance where she transforms herself sometime in only the space of a word from character to character.  It is entirely Fulton’s energy and skill that give the purple prose of Tremblay’s récit théâtral its theatricality. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Allegra Fulton as the Woman.  ©2014 John Lauener.

For tickets, visit www.nightwoodtheatre.net.