Jeff Irving on Student Audiences
Colleen Murphy's December Man - The Relevance for Today's Youth
Jeff Irving, who plays Jean Fournier opposite Brian Dooley and Nicola Lipman as his parents Kathleen and Benoit Fournier, on timely significance of The December Man
The Montreal Massacres happened December 6, 1989. Colleen Murphy’s award-winning play The December Man touches on the event, but is even more about family disconnect. Jeff Irving, known to audiences at The Shaw Festival, is currently playing his biggest role to date in The December Man and his soujourn into this Fournier family tragedy started last October.
This play is not really about the Montreal Massacres is it?
“That’s a trap that a lot of people get into. They come and say 'Oh this is about the Montreal Massacres,' and at first I fell into it too. But it’s really more about a family disconnect. That’s why the play is written in that way (backwards) because it gets rid of the idea of suicide, and it touches lightly on the Massacre but it’s really about that family and how they are like ships passing in the night. They just cannot connect because they don’t have the tools to connect. They were not raised to connect.”
Speaking of disconnect, do the younger audience members understand the gravity of what they are watching? You just finished a particularly racuous matinee.
“Doing shows where the audience is mostly kids, means you really have stay focused. You have to do it. That’s your job. You can’t say if that phone rings, if they start coughing, I’m not going on. You can’t do that. There are other people there as well who have paid to see the show.
But there are points where the silence was so thick that nobody spoke, where five minutes before that they were all chatting. But the kids did get drawn into it especially at the beginning. Nicola (Lipman) and Brian (Dooley) just pulled them right into the show.
Plus this event occurred before most of them were born....
"I don’t think kids in their minds can relate to this actual event. They can’t. Maybe their parents told them about it. But they can relate to Columbine, they can relate to Dawson, they can relate to Virginia Tech, and lockdowns plus what they go through in their own schools. My school where I am from, there wasn’t any of that kind of stuff. But it is crazy to hear that that’s the way it is here. So I know there has to be some resounding effects in them.
But they are teenagers and teenagers react differently when they are in a big group. They are not just watching this show. They know they are being watched by their peers so they have to make a reaction to what they are thinking. Even if they have an honest reaction, they are not going to cry because they would be made fun of so they laugh at it, but it’s a reaction. Now there are points during the show where they talk and are just being silly – say a scene change, and that distracts the audience which is a bit of a tough point, because the audience has probably paid more than they paid.
I give the big bad curse to the middle of the house and I always get laughs on the "effing chickens" line. That’s just how it goes. I come offstage and I say as I am leaving I always gets the last laugh.
What kind of questions did you get from the kids at talkbacks?
"The kids always ask great questions. They ask how playing these roles had effected us as human beings, how do we connect with those roles. They all sit forward and listen wanting to know more. You see the nervous hand – should I ask the question?
You get a lot of 'Oh my gosh, how did you do that? How are you?' One kid said to me 'I really liked your dream thing. How do you do it?' So I talked him through it. I did this research and I have these images and I think about this and I kind of walked him through how I would do it. I am not magician, but I don’t want to give away all my tricks. It is not as technical as that."
Jeff Irving's next role is Rolfe, "another challenging character arc", in The Sound of Music for Mirvish Productions in Toronto.
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