THEATRE REVIEW: Fragments de mensonges inutiles (Fragments of Useless Lies)
3 May '10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

As a production, it is surprisingly chaste, particularly when one considers that it is, at least in part, a contemporary story about teenage love, lust and sexuality — subjects rarely portrayed with full measures of chastity since back when Shakespeare was a pup.

Which is all more than passing strange, leading one to wonder if, in staging Michel Tremblay's latest play — a play that focuses in part on how parents deal with the revelation that their child might be gay — director Diana Leblanc has had trouble coming to terms with the sexuality of her teenaged characters as well.

The play is called Fragments de mensonges inutiles (or Fragments of Useless Lies) and it opened in its Toronto premiere at the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs on Friday, a production of Theatre francais de Toronto. Performed in French (with English Surtitles at selected performances), it is the story of a love affair between two 16-year-old boys, the reckless Jean-Marc (played by Michel Seguin) and the more conservative Manu (played by Jean-Simon Traversy).

Their affair has already begun when the play begins, and while Jean-Marc wants to embrace the love they feel, Manu is frightened to let his emotions run free, afraid of the deep hurt he considers inevitable. Their emotional turmoil is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that neither of them has come out to his parents, and neither particularly wants to, certain as they are that their parents will never be able to fully comprehend what they are experiencing.

To complicate the issue, and to demonstrate both how much things have changed in the past 50 years and how little, Tremblay places Jean-Marc squarely in the Quebec (and therefore highly Catholic) world of 1957 and Manu in the far more secular world of 2007.

Jean-Marc is reluctant to tell his  parents — his mother played by Marie-Helene Fontaine and his father by Christian Laurin, who also doubles as his priest — for fear that they will not understand, while Manu is certain his parents — his mother played by Gisele Rousseau and his father by Olivier L'Ecuyer who also doubles as his shrink  — will not only force themselves to understand but will try to interfere as well.

It is an often talky script that underlines the struggles that gays and their families still encounter, despite changing attitudes, underlining the fact that despite a half-century of change, at least a few fundamental facts remain — few parents hope for a gay child, few straight teens ever have to "come out" to their parents.

It's a touching story, but under Leblanc's direction, working on a stark, multi-level set designed by Glen Charles Landry and lit by Glenn Davidson, it's a story that seems to take place from the neck up, with Seguin and Traversy evoking not so much two teenagers in love as two buddies with occasional lip privileges.

Tremblay's work, of course, is always deeper than it appears — and Fragments represents a particularly strong metaphor for the current arrangement between Canada's two solitudes. But in this oddly asexual staging, almost utterly devoid of passion, it seems Leblanc was directing the metaphor rather than the play.