The Gazette (Montreal)
January 22, 2005 Saturday

Chilly reception: Travelling playwrights David French and Hrant
Alianak draw a tiny crowd for their recent meet-the-authors session

MATT RADZ, The Gazette

Our town hasn’t been lucky or much good for Toronto playwright David
French. He once rode a bus out of here, suicide on his brain, after
his Montreal girlfriend dumped him. There hasn’t been a major
production of instant classics like Leaving Home or Of The Fields,
Lately that established him as Canada’s “national playwright” in the
early 1970s. No mainstage French since Salt-Water Moon sold a lot of
tickets and won a handful of awards for the Saidye Bronfman Centre
three seasons ago.

And after the cold reception, and we’re not just talking about the
weather, that French and fellow travelling author Hrant Alianak
received this week, you can’t blame him if he never comes back.
Though he might be tempted, should we organize the kind of 15-play,
three-movie, 18-day festival that Winnipeg has put together to
celebrate the oeuvre of another national playwright, Michel Tremblay.

“Two playwrights and a critic … well, there’s Canadian theatre for
you,” Alianak grins after doing a quick head count of the audience
assembled, if that’s the word, for a mid-afternoon meet-the-authors
session in Centaur’s cafe on Monday.

“This is insulting, really,” Newfoundland-born French, 66, said with
a shrug in the lobby later. “There would have been more people if
this was in California.” Not to say warmer, all around.

Eventually, a few more dropped by, including Centaur’s
general-manager Chuck Childs, and they were rewarded with an
anecdotal history of how indigenous theatre was born in this country,
related by a tag team of stage veterans who have never collaborated
on a production during a lifelong friendship.

“My play, Tantrums, opened in April (1972) and David’s (Leaving Home)
opened in May,” Alianak notes. Born of Armenian parents in Sudan in
1950, he came to Canada in 1967. The author of explicitly surrealist
plays like Return of the Big Five, The Blues and Lucky Strike is
regarded as Canada’s foremost experimental playwright.

Filmgoers will remember him for his role in Atom Egoyan’s Family
Viewing (1987).

The smaller the audience, the better the show. A trooper’s anger at
those who stayed away, combined with a sense of obligation to those
who came, triggers a more focused and determined effort – especially
from Canadian playwrights who have to learn early on to swallow
rejection for breakfast, and to eat rebuffs for lunch, if they want
to survive another day of trying to break even.

Alianak and French are trained actors and the latter’s reading of Ben
Mercer’s speech that opens his 1973 classic Of The Fields, Lately was
as moving a moment of theatre as we have witnessed at Centaur – “It
takes many incidents to build a wall between two men, brick by brick.
Sometimes you’re not aware of the building …”

As poignant was French’s recollection of how he met, and walked out
on, the late Bill Glassco, who went on to produce premieres of all
his plays at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, including the latest
instalment of the Mercer saga, Soldier’s Heart, in 2001.

And French relived the quasi-mystical moment when he suddenly found
his vocation in Mr. Beane’s Grade 8 library class.

A sports-crazy “class clown” who “grew up in a home with no books,”
the playwright-to-be was ordered by the exasperated teacher, a stern,
well-dressed disciplinarian, to stand in the corner, get a book from
the shelf and SHUT UP!

As destiny would have it, the young French snatched up a copy of Tom
Sawyer and began to read. “After 15 minutes I knew I wanted to be a
writer – and that I was a writer,” he said. “It was so weird, a
strong sense, mystical. I don’t understand it. I never tell that
story.”

French and Alianak came to Montreal to talk about the early days of
Passe Muraille and Tarragon with Robert Astle’s Canadian Theatre
History class at Concordia.

“This is the first year I am teaching the course,” Astle said over a
smoked-meat sandwich with the visiting authors in the “poet’s corner”
at Ben’s deli earlier in the day, “and I thought rather than just
talk about the early days of Canadian drama, I’d introduce the
students to two of the people who were there, who started it all.”

– – –

Michel Tremblay told an interviewer this week that astonished and
flattered though he is by the festival of his works that opened in
Winnipeg Thursday, he’s also a little fearful, because playgoers
seeing so many of his plays at once might decide “je ne suis pas si
bon que ca (I am not as good as all that).”

Now in its fifth year, Winnipeg’s Master Playwright Festival has
already paid homage to Pinter, Brecht, Albee and Beckett. This is the
first time it has recognized a Canadian writer. This year’s bilingual
Tremblay program runs until Feb. 6. For details:

– – –

Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw Festival honcho who directed Tremblay’s Past
Perfect at Centaur last season, heads the search committee for the
next English-language artistic director at the National Arts Centre.
Marti Maraden, who has held the post since 1997, will be stepping
down at the end of this season.