by Colleen Murphy
Directed by Micheline Chevrier
A Citadel Theatre and
Canadian Stage Co-Production
at the Berkeley Street Theatre
April 7-May 17, 2008

    Much has been made in the press of the fact that Colleen Murphy’s play works backwards in time—a fact that merely makes it imitative of Harold Pinter who did the same thing many years ago in Betrayal, a drama of a triangular love or sexual relationship. The December Man begins at an end—the double suicide of the parents of one of the young male students who witnessed and escaped the terrible massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. What causes these suicides is the prior suicide of their young son Jean who proved totally unable to deal with memories of the killer’s rampage and his own neurotic dysfunction. However, the play proceeds by deliberate displacement: it almost turns the Montreal Massacre into a mere springboard for domestic satire and clichéd psychodrama. Much of the play is like warmed-over material from French Canadian fiction and drama of the 50s and 60s—with its anxious Catholic mother, a weary, alcohol-guzzling working class father with grievances against his English bosses, and their dysfunctional son—and much of it is like warmed-over but diluted Tennessee Williams—with the son’s desperate need to escape his family environment, the unbearable pressures of the real world, and his own warped psyche.

   The crazed anti-feminist killer and his immediate victims are all invisible, being no more than sound-bytes from television or references dropped by the family trio at sporadic instances. Instead, the playwright strives to focus on the bleak family tragedy of Benoit, Kathleen, and Jean, but even at that, the play remains surprisingly low-keyed and fatally generic. The opening scene veers from bathetic comedy to repressed tragedy as Kathleen (played with a stoop and a mixture of resentment, perplexity, despair, and incongruous comedy by excellent Nicola Lipman) plans how to fall forward so that her head will land on the coffee-table as she and her husband (a contained but affecting performance by Brian Dooley) await death. This curious mode is maintained. In the next scene, Kathleen knits ten toques, ten sweaters, and ten mitts while worrying about mortal sin as Benoit drinks Scotch. She can’t bear going down to their son’s room; Benoit wants to move to Chomedy. In August 1991, she is seen dusting furniture with Jean’s pajamas. The leaning tower (meant to be a skyscraper) model for their son’s engineering project is preserved like a holy relic. The parents get into a heated argument about Jean’s burial place. The play eschews the sensational—usually a commendable choice—but in this case, it virtually wallows in the mundane and the banal. A Christmas tree, “Frosty the Snowman,” a red parka for Jean, an argument about Jean’s reluctance to attend mass, his complaint about his mother’s nagging, Jean’s lack of interest in breakfast sausage—these seem to have more dramatic purpose than the actual massacre.

   When Jean actually appears almost midway through the story, he is little more than a cliché. Haunted by the massacre, he has a nightmare from which he awakes, screaming. Though he also has a dream in which he heroically tries to rescue the women, he lacerates himself with guilt at having done nothing in actuality to save anyone, and he is pursued in his own disturbed mind by ghosts of the women. His father can’t offer much solace other than a platitude: “You can blame yourself forever or understand it is not all your fault.” However, the question remains whether Jean was psychologically damaged even before the massacre. After all, Jean has never once invited a friend home for dinner, and his taste in movies is remarkably adolescent (he saw Teenage Mutant Ninjas twice!). Consequently, we wonder if Jean would have been suicidal regardless of his witnessing the massacre. This automatically leads to a second question: wouldn’t his parents have killed themselves whatever the reason for his own suicide?

   The most affecting moments belong to the parents rather than to Jean, especially in their wrenching anguish. Dooley and Lipman score largely as each registers distinctive differences in register and tone. However, neither performer is given the opportunity either by the text or Micheline Chevrier’s somewhat awkward direction to build a character that tunnels into trauma with powerful after-shocks. They, like Ereca Hassell’s lighting, are mainly subdued.   

photos: Ian Jackson

pic 1: Brian Dooley and Nicola Lipman

pic 2: Jeff Irving and Nicola Lipman



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