Photo: François Laplante Delagrave After abandoning the man she was to marry at the altar, Rosannah knocks on the door of Henry’s old barn with whom she will develop a life-saving relationship .
In 1992, at the Quat’Sous, at the helm of which he was then, Pierre Bernard directed Sylvie Drapeau and Luc Picard in Traces d’étoiles, a text by Cindy Lou Johnson created in New York a few years earlier and translated from English by a very promising beginner, Maryse Warda. The show was a resounding success, to say the least. These days, at the Rideau Vert, in the company of Mylène Mackay and Maxim Gaudette, the director is reconnecting with the play, one of those poignant face-to-face encounters that American theater has the secret to.
After abandoning her fiancé at the altar, after driving from Arizona to Alaska without even taking off her wedding dress, after walking for an hour in a spectacular snowstorm, a white out throwing a great white veil over the sky, the earth and the air, Rosannah knocks at the door of Henry’s old barn. The meeting between the fugitive and the hermit was as improbable as it will be saving. In the middle of nowhere, so to speak alone in the world, prisoners of the elements, the two skinned people will gradually drop their masks. In 90 minutes, as if each had the key to open the heart of the other, we will see them let go, share the sufferings, remorse and regrets, and even the hopes that remain, in short we will observe them recognize each other.
Although psychological, even psychologizing, based on a catharsis that is predictable to say the least, the piece crosses time quite well. It’s about love and commitment, bereavement and mental health, themes that have lost none of their relevance. But the main interest of the work lies in the tone it adopts: one foot in realism and the other in great strangeness. What the public sees and hears, without being totally dissociated from everyday life, is a representation of the psychic state of the characters, the embodiment of a distorted relationship to the world, of a feeling of inadequacy, of a distortion of real that is reminiscent of fairy tales. Thus, the irruption of Rosannah at Henry’s certainly evokes Alice’s plunge into Wonderland.
Daniel Castonguay, who had designed the decor for the first version, located the camera in a mysterious place at will. With its sloping plane, receding lines and truncated perspectives, a dizzying architecture magnified by lighting by Julie Basse, the scenography greatly contributes to the effectiveness of the show. Skillfully using the imbalance imposed on them by the set, as accurate in the scathing dialogues as in the heartbreaking monologues, Mylène Mackay and Maxim Gaudette incarnate with finesse the delicate stages of taming, the incandescence of beings and the providential crossing of their trajectories. .
Star Traces
Text: Cindy Lou Johnson. Translation: Maryse Warda. Director: Pierre Bernard. At the Théâtre du Rideau Vert until June 10.