Colleen Murphy: Potent playRite

Award Winner The December Man comes to Toronto's Canadian Stage

Mar 27, 2008

Canada's most controversial playwright on the future of progressive theatre, troubled youth, winning the Governor's General's Award, and more Murphy works to come.

In this interview series, playwright / filmmaker Colleen Murphy speaks about the process of writing The December Man, (L'homme de décembre), about the alarming increase in campus shootings and why they continue to happen, plus her many works in progress, including an opera about sex trafficking and a full scale play set in Rome.

"I believe what I believe. I believe you open a kid’s mouth and pour hate down their throat they’re gonna grow up hating everything - women, men, kids, even puppies...." – Benoit Fournier, from The December Man.(L'homme de décembre)

In 2007, Colleen Murphy won the Governor General's Literary Award in Drama for The December Man.(L'homme de décembre) This is a play based on the ripple effect of a public tragedy. One might think of L'école Polytechnique student Sarto Blais; still many more have suffered and continue to suffer from this historic tragedy.

The December Man (L'homme de décembre) directed for Canadian Stage by Micheline Chevrier, is the story of what happens when a struggling working class couple from Montreal, Kathleen and Benoit Fournier, try to help son Jean deal with the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre. At the beginning of the play, the last pebble is thrown. The first scene begins in March 1992, but the plays ends in December 1989.

How did you write The December Man? (L'homme de décembre).It's a little like Harold Pinter's Betrayal.

It’s hard writing backwards which I actually did. In fact, that made it both easier and harder. It’s a very emotional piece. It’s tough, not just emotionally, but technically and structurally as well. I remember spending a long time with lists trying to figure out when to go into the story – three months after, four months and then it would have to be how would I tell where I was, where they were, without saying anything and then the thing of Easter, of Christmas. I just remember that the technical angle was just as tough as the emotional one."

That doesn’t surprise me at all. To me this is three different stories – the one played through the characters, the one that you cannot help going back to in your head if you recall Dec 6 1989, and the story between the lines.

"Ah – there is always a story between the lines, and it just falls into place. When you get into a play with the characters, you have to go with the flow. You can’t sit back and analyse because then it takes you out of that place whatever that place is. You go inside the characters and they often bring an emotional and psychological layer with them."

There are such a ripple effect in this horribly timely piece. And since you wrote this, so many more of these types of campus shootings have occurred.

"Yes, there was a front page article in The New York Times about the "new normal" in terms of school lockdowns. I have a big problem with the fact that people do all of this lockdown stuff, but they never actually question it. Nobody asks the question of why. What’s going on with these young people, what’s going on inside them, their world, their society. Why is this happening? What’s going on in the family? Nobody ever ask these questions. They just think – today we are going to learn new ways to hide under our desks. They accept that the psychopath or the person who loses it is just going to come in, and that I find more frightening that anything. There is a silence, acquiescence, collusion."

I know that this piece has been well received but audience members have spoken to you after the show? What do you think they take with them from this?

"I did speak to people in Calgary and they are usually pretty emotional. There’s not much to say because this play is either an emotional experience for an audience member or it’s nothing. I am not saying it’s nothing. I am saying there’s nothing to talk about. It’s not an intellectual play. It’s not a concept play. I am not making any judgments, really. I just allow the audience to have, if they wish, an emotional experience in terms of being involved with this family for an hour and a half. What they take from that, they take from it. I don’t manipulate anything or at least I sure try not to or I hope I didn’t."

This is like the other side of The Anorak, recently performed at Ryerson in Toronto the one-man piece written and performed by playwright Adam Kelly who actually plays Marc Lépine.

“Yes. There are 1,000 stories in this story – 1,000 angles and approaches – the ripple effect. Adam Kelly was in my play The Piper when I was at York University. I love Adam. (Kelly has recently moved to New York.) I remember when he sent me the first draft of The Anorak, and it just blew me away. ”

Part Two - Colleen Murphy in candid conversation about today's troubled youth and where her own son was on Sept 13, 2006 during the Dawson College shootings.

The December Man (L'homme de décembre) opens April 7 to May 17 at Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto.

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