THEATRE REVIEW: HOSANNA
11 AUG/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 2/5

STRATFORD - Politics, we’ve all been told, can make for strange bedfellows. It turns out, however, that sometimes if you remove the politics, those bedfellows can be just as strange, or even stranger.

Case in point: the Stratford Festival’s revival of Michel Tremblay’s ground-breaking Quebecois classic Hosanna, which hit the stage of the Studio Theatre Wednesday with something that sounded suspiciously like a thud.

To refresh your memory, Hosanna became a bit of an international sensation in its English language première at the Tarragon Theatre in 1974, featuring as it did an acclaimed translation by John Van Burek and the late Bill Glassco and, in the title role, rising young Canadian actor Richard Monette, who would go on to make his name as the longest serving artistic director in the history of this festival.

Back then, this tale of a Montreal drag queen — the Hosanna of title — and her motorcycle riding boyfriend Cuirette no doubt provided a surreptitious look inside the then-daring and mysteriously naughty gay subculture, while at the same time using that subculture as a metaphor for a broader Canadian culture and the growing disconnect between French and English Canada.

While Hosanna’s outfit — an evocation of Cleopatra, as played by Elizabeth Taylor, in her triumphal entry into Rome whipped up by Hosanna herself for a Halloween fête — no doubt raised eyebrows in a world that had not even fully begun to comprehend the notion of gay equality, not to mention gay marriage. That’s certainly not the sole reason for the play’s success; instead, it was finally the language of the play that excited theatrical purists — a rich, earthy English-language evocation of joual, the distinctive language of Quebecois’ francophone streets, unlike anything that had been previously heard on the English stage.

And although this production works with the same translation as that original production, under the direction of Weyni Mengesha, almost all of that magical linguistic sense of place has disappeared. As he roams around Michael Gianfrancesco’s littered, squalid set like a be-sequined linebacker, a sculpted Gareth Potter’s Hosanna only really bothers to put a French Canadian twist on his pronunciation of place names, while as Cuirette, Oliver Becker doesn’t even go that far.

Sadly — and not surprisingly — many of the political overtones of the piece disappear right along with its linguistic integrity, leaving an audience feeling like they’ve stumbled on a gay episode of the Bickersons, as an overwrought Hosanna recalls her comeuppance at the hands of a group of vengeful drag queens earlier in the evening.
And while a ’70s audience might have been content to accept Hosanna as the poster child for a gay culture taking its first tentative steps out of the societal closet to which it had been too long exiled, in today’s more enlightened world, this production’s refusal to confront the political overtones of the piece simply underlines the fact that as purely an examination of the gay subculture, it has its shortcomings.

While the whole notion of a selfish and domineering mother’s role in ‘causing’ homosexuality was almost obligatory in the ’70s, for instance, that notion has since been thoroughly debunked. Moreover, based on Tremblay’s dialogue, one can’t help but think that a Hosanna for the 21st century would deal far more with gender reassignment than simple cross-dressing.

Finally, while both Potter and Becker tackle their roles with a certain commitment — and with varying degrees of success — where the production finally fails is in Mengesha’s inability to fuse her two actors into any sort of believable relationship. As a result, when Cuirette finally moves to comfort the grieving Hosanna, it is a moment that, for all its nudity, proves devoid of anything but the most cursory basic intimacy. And what it lacks in the queer bedfellows department, it certainly makes for in strange bedfellows.