THEATRE REVIEW: TOUT COMME ELLE (JUST LIKE HER)
15 JUN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 5 out of 5

TORONTO - Since the days of Isis and Astarte, and before that, no doubt, stretching all the way back to the very beginning of time, women have had a secret worth celebrating — a mystery they have explored in rites both temporal and religious, sometimes in the company of men, at others, exclusively on their own. They are exploring it still today — and in a new play titled TOUT COMME ELLE (Just Like Her), it is being celebrated joyfully with anyone with the will to approach it with open eyes, open ears and open hearts to share it.

As many things are in the world of women, TCE is a collaborative effort — first between playwright Louise Dupré, director Brigitte Haentjens and translator Erin Moure, who has served up Dupré's original French text in elegantly simple, moving English. Their collaboration then expands to include a technical team comprised of even more talented women (and a few men), who do a fine job of setting the stage to embrace what surely must be one of the most remarkable casts ever to grace a Toronto stage — 50 of Toronto's most talented actors of the female persuasion, celebrating a shared sisterhood that stretches all the way back to Eve herself.

There's a lovely sense of timelessness right from the top of the show, as these 50 cast members (naming them all here is simply impossible; naming only a few, simply unthinkable) arrayed in everything from undergarments and sleeping apparel to street, business and formal wear, slowly appear and step into 50 pairs of shoes they find scattered across of the Bluma Appel stage where the play opened under the aegis of Necessary Angel Tuesday as part of Luminato. In the process, they immediately and effectively create a subtle but brilliant metaphor that stretches across the 100 minutes-plus duration of the show.

Like all women, the playwright seems to be saying in a text these actors embrace, they are all in some sense destined from birth to step into someone else's shoes — someone's, but not just anyone's. Young or old, zaftig or whippet-thin, drawn from every race and ethnicity, they share two things with each other and every other woman born. They are all, in fact, daughters of mothers and all biologically programmed to become mothers of daughters themselves, becoming in the process in ways both arcane and obvious, their own mothers reborn, repeating rituals, celebrations and mistakes that are the inevitable stations on the voyage from womb to the grave.

Using song, movement, choral speaking and monologue, they conspire to fill the stage with life, exploring the often stormy, always mysterious and intricate bond between mother and daughter in myriad ways. Simply to hear each of these women identify herself as the daughter of her mother is to experience the biblical begats, run in reverse, as their voices ring with a genetic memory that seems to bind them all in a very meaningful and glorious way to the very beginnings of time. Chafe under those bonds as they might, they seem to exult in the fact that those bonds are nonetheless indestructible.

But make no mistake, simply because this play brings 50 women together on stage to celebrate the bond between mothers and daughters, it is never content to be merely chick shtick. You don't, after all, have to have been a mother or a daughter to have loved one — and TOUT COMME ELLE opens windows into a world that's as strange and oddly familiar, one suspects, to the males in the audience as it is to the females For in the end, it is all about an eternal mystery — and the goal here is to celebrate it, not to solve it.