Theatrical, of course. After all, this is a play titled The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt. But in Michel Marc Bouchard’s new work, we have, as well, theatrical in religion, in industry, in society, in intimate relations, in one’s very being. Moreover, under Jackie Maxwell’s inspired and centered direction, this production of Bouchard’s play confronts as it engages in each of these dimensions. At the same time, it resonates as a whole like a potent cleansing ritual that, as it ironically celebrates human potential, also hits home repeatedly that human essence is made of dirt. One is thus only hypocritically clean, never done with the past that cannot be undone, never free of one’s place in a social and economic world that darkens one’s spirit. Can there be light?
At the outset, with “lily-white beds” before us, we witness a young man climbing a ladder in a room that is both monumental and austere in atmosphere. He climbs upward slowly toward a window, toward the light. Symbolic, certainly, but he holds binoculars in his hand and the Divine he seeks here as we watch is not the God of his religion, but a divinity of the stage, the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt. She has come to Quebec City in 1905 to do her art, an art that feeds him. The young man, Michaud, is both a budding priest and a budding playwright, and the ecstasies open to both these pursuits, we find, overlap. We will soon be asking what, if anything, is pure and holy in what people do and what is not.
Church attire is referred to as costume by Michaud, a self-indulgent lad with money and social status behind him, who can fantasize the world into drama. For Talbot, brought to the Seminary by his mom and brother, this “costume” means an escape from the poverty to which his family is brutally condemned, a poverty which gives their conversation a subdued and tentative feel. The brother, Leo, has a perpetual cough from working in a shoe factory, the same factory that has given his mother’s back a spinal bend. But Michaud, always making notes for his play, sees Talbot as an authentic character he can write about. While Talbot condemns the artificiality of theatre, Michaud says of Bernhardt that “when she speaks, words take wings.” Is Michaud being mocked, or is theatre itself?
The next scene “housed” in the dormitory takes place in the factory where “The Boss” can easily afford a new suit and he can just as easily step down hard with his heel on a female agitator’s fingers. He is casual and smug in his brutality. At the same time, we are left to wonder if we have here Bouchard’s play about a play written by one of his characters or Michaud’s unwritten play already before us. And how is the playwright Bouchard himself a character in a play and which play is it? The scene changes here are quick and efficient and, as we note already how words cannot embody poverty, we next meet Bernhardt who, when told “You are extraordinary” responds, as if stating a divinely determined fact, “I know.” She also mocks those who come to see social dramas, those who at interval drink champagne that the poor depicted in such plays will never be near able to afford. We sense that this woman is both a self-indulgent actress and also an inherently theatrical human being, an actor both with and without a mask. If so, why go on stage? But then, if already spiritual, why become a priest? Bouchard implies many questions and makes us ask many more.
Brother Casgrain, a man with the firm bearing of authority, represents a church that forbids “books that destroy the soul.” He bluntly enters the lives of others with intention to have them obey, and yet can declare to Michaud, with unexpected and vulnerable tenderness, “Your presence is the only joy in life.” However, Casgrain will have the church save face –save its mask and stay in character- and buy such stability at any price. He will conceal Talbot’s sexual abuse, buy his silence by saving the latter’s family from the dregs of poverty, conceal one reality by offering another that serves self-interest and not ideals. One can be hypocritical in doing good, we find. And still, others may benefit.
It is ironic, then, when Sarah accuses Michaud of avoiding “the wretched aspects of human existence” since she herself filters such knowledge through the medium of theatre. “Let anger be your guide,” she tells him. Does she know the inadequacy of theatre, one that playwright Bouchard hits home, or that such “outrage” can lead not to the theatrical stage but to social revolution? She condemns the “yoke of the clergy,” observes that Canada is a country with no real men,” but lest we, the self-satisfied audience nod our heads or even cheer her on, Bouchard has her also declare, “I have no idea what one wears to a factory.” If, as actress, she is theatre to the world, then in outrage she is, in part, theatre to herself. She will soon be dressed in magnified white while others, at the factory are not.
Meanwhile, The Boss rehearses his brutally oppressed workers into another brand of performance, one for the visitor Sarah Bernhardt come to their factory. Like a capitalist exploiter, like a priest, like a playwright –all omnipotent in their own way- he implies their lines when he asks if they are happy. Their affirmative is like a chant from a congregation –the uncritical audience in religion- and soon Bernhardt will note that they answer her question before she asks it of them. Later Casgrain will remark that “your theatre is as harmless as a sermon” and indeed, in this play, Bouchard addresses so many of the self-critical questions that a writer, while looking honestly and deep into a mirror, must ask.
The price for not doing so, we find in Casgrain, is to –irony again- lose one’s human spirit while submitting to whatever the church may actually be and giving one’s soul to God. Again, Bouchard implies an existential dimension to his characters who exist only if they lie and others lie to them and others lie for them. Bouchard’s characters wrestle with being and identity and as such we who observe must do likewise since, if we treat theatre as entertainment removed from ourselves and not as a deepening reflection of what we are, we do not exist and our identity is nothing. Bouchard provides us in fact with an “either-or” when at the end of the play we have actress Bernhardt in a melodramatic stage performance and the same lady, now idealistic, also explaining the human value of her art which has just been artificial.
Bouchard’s play is an unrelenting study of the double-entendre of one’s very being. We speak what we are and, it here turns out, there is ever-present ambiguity in what we say and what we do. Jackie Maxwell’s production is a gripping blend of theatre and ritual, constantly fluid in its change of sets and realities. Moreover, with design of Michael Gianfrancesco, lighting of Bonnie Beecher, and John Gzowski’s sound, we are presented with a world that is cool yet inviting, austere yet seductive, bare but richly resonant, stylized but humanly immediate. It’s a setting of shapes, lighting, and sound with immediacy in impact that one cannot escape. Plain and simple, this is the world and these are our lives.
The program makes this note: “A dormitory in the prestigious Grand Seminary of Quebec houses all the scenes of the play” and certainly all the world’s a stage and it is not location but our being as such, in each context, that defines and describes each role we play. In presenting this demanding fact of existence, we have an exceptional cast, with characters delivered in a manner that is measured yet potently rich with untold lives and meanings. The Bernhardt of Fiona Reid is a woman of casual egoism who combines passion, insight about her art, cluelessness about societal conditions, and remoteness within her air of accessibility. She is both divine in her art and, because it is privilege alone that can afford her art, incidental to most other people’s lives. Reid conveys dynamism and power through understatement and suggestive poses or gestures, all while remaining, intriguingly, just out of reach. As with Michaud, others, an audience included, come to her.
Wade Bogert-O’Brien’s Talbot is complex, ripe with inner tensions, inwardly wounded and genuinely capable of elation. His struggle is palpable for both himself and for us, as we feel that he must choose from a table of impossibilities. Bogert-O’Brien, in this penetrating performance, makes us feel both sad with hopelessness and real to the world. Equally brilliant in unflinching creation, Ben Sanders as Michaud comes on strong initially as a sheltered and unbendingly enthusiastic. But, with his honed speech and observant mind, he reveals an undercurrent of one who is unwaveringly present to what the world presents. It’s compelling on Sanders’ part that he doesn’t “change” as such but he “develops” profoundly and we are further curious about his unspoken depths.
These two performances by Bogert-O’Brien and by Sanders are gems. But there are outstanding others as well. Equally unlived and strongly present is Martin Happer’s Brother Casgrain whose personal tragedy seeps into our consciousness over the course of the play. Being a man of deliberate secrets, he implies a life unlived or a life lived with too hard an impact on him, and thus his painful irresolution becomes ours. He is determined, but we always sense there’s a devastating reason for his being so. Mary Haney’s Mrs. Talbot is equally touching, a woman worn down by life who plays the part she must act, must be, in order to continue and we sense survival, sometimes fragile, within her. As expected with Haney, her compelling presence is here anchored firm and deep within character.
Ric Reid as The Boss is disturbing in his ease and indifferent acceptance of cruelty, especially since we witness ruined, struggling lives about him in his factory. Kyle Orzech as younger brother Leo gives his blend of noble purpose and the discovery of life’s cruel truths a genuinely youthful feeling of pain. Once again, ideals do not come through without dents and bruises, if at all. But such, indeed, is one lesson of Bouchard’s remarkable play. We are entertained by this very theatrical creation, to be sure, but we are also then disturbed, as a result, when compelled to resolve somehow what we see and hear and then imagine in the theatre of our minds. It is here that anything goes and our roles are never resolved or defined. Thanks to top-notch directing and acting, we are certainly fueled with ideas and feelings which we cannot leave be. We may try to ignore such art, but we cannot escape its presence, its implied demands on us to be humanly better than we have been.