Photo: Cube Gallery. Gerald Trottier “Dead Person”. Last night at the Cube Art Gallery, down the street from the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre where I was planning on seeing the first preview of Butcher, there was a Vernissage of an exhibition by Canadian artist Gerald Trottier, entitled “Wounded Creatures of the Earth”.  It is a series of watercolour and mixed media drawings, showing cruel images of human beings going through ritualized behaviour often related to Christian sacrifice, to revolution, to individual and collective suffering in the world, to poetic symbols of human figures torn apart, embedded in trees that evoke the crucifixion or human beings huddled together in distress or seeking warmth and comfort.

Photo John Koensgen.   Down the street, Nicolas Billon’s play Butcher was opening an hour later the same evening, and it occurred to me that the Trottier exhibition was an excellent preparation for anyone intending to see Billon’s play.  Trottier’s work,  strongly influenced by images of Catholic based  sacrifice, martyrdom and uplifting redemption played out by unidentifiable human figures, is very near  the spirit of Billon’s play, which is  more deeply  anchored in the horrors of current history.  Billon’s work identifies the monsters of our time and rapidly fits them into recent events which bombard us every day on television and radio. In other words, Trottier the visual artist is the unquestionable visionary whereas  Billon, the playwright  makes the links  between  ancient and contemporary political culture producing  visual signs that are all recognizable.

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Photo David Leclerc

The long awaited Boom directed, written and performed by Rick Miller is both seductive and questionable, especially as it purports to be a cultural history of the Baby Boomer generation that will incite young people to become interested in their own stories as well as world history. It turns out to be an amalgamation of various narrative structures that function in different ways, some are successful and others much less so. Rick the actor begins by introducing us to a film of Maddy his mother, projected against a huge pole of light that stands in the centre of the stage. This is the background against which all the floating images, the films, the lighting effects and the great mass of visual information will unfold during the evening. Structured by chronological time (1945-1969), the stage event becomes, the story of Rick’s own life told through fragments of historical information and personal experiences by multiple voices whose identities are not at all clear and who splinter the whole narrative into so many pieces it is difficult to locate any kind of centre.

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Steve Martin’s adaptation is the clue to this essentially expressionist based comedy by Carl Sternheim written in German in 1910. Directed by Don Fex, the play concerns a husband drowned in the bureaucracy of the Monarchy echoeing  Gogol’s wild Russian comedy The Revizor and foretelling  Kafka’s alienation within the terrifying bureaucratic state in the Trial (1925). It even suggests  tinges of antisemitism that pop up in the dialogue between Mr. Cohen and Theo, the tyrannical husband, an iconic pre-fascist bully typical of the prewar literatures of central Europe. However, once Steve Martin got his hands on it the time frame, the references all collapsed and gave rise to total chaos. We were left with something that is no longer linked to any particular historical period but that brings them all in as a hysterical salad whose ingredients are clearly left to the choice of director, Don Fex. In the background we hear Marlene Dietrich singing cabaret style songs from the 1920’s in the Blue Angel style; we hear military marches from the Austro-Hungarian pre WWI period, the suggestions lead us to believe we were in a pre-1914 period suggested by the women’s costumes which were quite beautiful . Although Gertrude’s bustle…which wasn’t really a bustle, was out of date already.

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