news
Twisted Roots and Words in Forests
The cast of Forests, in the initial dinner celebration scene. The guests, and even the expectant parents, are blissfully unaware of the decades-old familial trauma that’s part of the forthcoming child’s birthright. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
In the opening scene of Québécois (and Governor General Award–winning) playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s new play, Forests, his follow-up to the acclaimed Scorched, a woman has gathered her friends for a dinner to announce wonderful news: she and her husband are pregnant. But, disturbingly, she also reveals she’s starting to have odd memory lapses. A visit to a neurologist sparks a mystery that will be reluctantly taken up years later by her teenage daughter, crossing continents, reaching back five generations, and unravelling secrets of a family wracked by murder, rape, and abandonment.
Described in such brevity, the events of the play sound particularly heavy and unsettling, but there are also quite a few examples of people making sacrifices and doing wonderful things for love of each other, blood relation or no. Many of the disturbing twists in Forests are somewhat mitigated by slips back and forth between realism and poetic imagery. Mouawad gives nearly every character the capacity to describe his or her emotional turmoil—in reaction to (and sometimes provoking) heinous acts—with evocative and ornate poetry. It’s the reverse of real life: the people in Forests become increasingly articulate as they become more disturbed and upset.
The pedigree of Mouawad’s past work (and the fact that every actor gets at least one eloquent speech), helped director Richard Rose assemble a first-rate cast. The ensemble boasts Canuck theatre legend R.H. Thompson as an obsessive paleologist (he and Vivien Endicott-Douglas as the teenage protagonist Loup, being snowed upon in the picture above, are the only actors who portray just one character); Soulpepper stalwarts like Liisa Repo-Martell and Matthew Edison (who at one point, due to doubling, sets out to kill another character he will play); and Scorched alumni Sophie Goulet and Alon Nashman, who brings back his bumbling and kind-hearted notary for a cameo under a different name.
It’s the women of the play, though—the sometimes recurring-in-multiple-generation characters played by Repo-Martell, Goulet, Jan Alexandra Smith, and Terry Tweed—who Mouawad focuses on most. Each generation of the seemingly cursed family features a mother who ends up separating (or being separated) from her offspring. Loup’s quest to uncover why all these children were seemingly abandoned results in bringing some horrible shames and crimes to light, but the obvious hope is that it will provide some answers and closure to several impacted generations. The concept of “postmemory”—that is, descendants harbouring dreams and recollections of traumatic events suffered by their forebears—factors into the family’s sufferings, most notably by Smith’s Aimée, whose life has been seemingly normal before her neurological condition manifests.
Where Scorched tackled multi-generational trauma set amongst random violence and war, and kept the specifics of country and history vague, Forests examines violence committed mostly by family members against each other, against the backdrop of identifiable 20th-century events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the trench warfare of the First World War, the French Resistance movement of the Second World War, and even the Montreal Massacre. This sometimes results in red herrings for the convoluted plot, and clashes with the mythical elements of Greek tragedy some of the play’s events are invested with. (The ancient style is reinforced by a recitation from Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and furthermore when Aimée names her daughter in an Oracle-like epilectic fit.)
Moreover, that habit of characters lapsing into poetic speeches, in a tone very similar to a Greek chorus, can be distancing for the audience and sometimes jarringly out of character, especially for Endicott-Douglas’ Loup, who otherwise provides wonderful moments of poorly articulated rage and snarky teenage angst. We couldn’t help but compare the effect to the recent Studio 180/Canadian Stage production of Our Class, which also addressed the effects of violence, rape, and atrocities committed by family and close friends upon each other. That production also incorporated poetry, but distinguished it from the character’s own revelations; they remained constant in their levels of eloquence. We also noted with some relief in our review of Our Class that each actor played just one character. In Forests, the constant shifts in time period and character can prove challenging to follow, especially over the course of almost three hours.
The production has stripped the Tarragon Mainspace stage down to the brick, removing all curtains, legs, and backdrops, save for a suspended upstage glass divider that helps suggest various settings—a hospital room, the view outside a window, etc. A barely perceptible slant of the stage becomes apparent when rain starts pouring onto it (the cast must endure both snow and rain over the course of the show). Clever set and staging details they are, indeed, though it’s difficult to say whether they elevate the show significantly. We found ourselves watching the patter of water splashing on stage when we probably should’ve been focused on the actors.
There are fine performances from all the play’s actors, especially Brandon McGibbon as an institutionalized survivor of the family’s most terrible incidents, and the show’s been well staged. But as a play, Forests seems to lack much of the focus and thematic precision that gave Scorched its enduring resonance. This translation (and to be fair, it’s the first English version) is also more stilted than past Mouawad plays, perhaps not quite matching his carefully crafted speeches in his native tongue. Rather than being a profound epic, this third entry in his four-play cycle settles somewhere between that and a noble failure. While there’s plenty of commendable work in the production, we have our doubts that Forests will be mentioned with the same reverence as Scorched in a few years’ time.
Wajdi Mouawad’s Forests, translated by Linda Gaboriau and directed by Richard Rose, plays until May 29 at the Tarragon Theatre (30 Bridgeman Avenue), Tuesday–Saturday at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday 2:30 p.m. matinees.