Pardon My French

Plan B, a political satire by Toronto playwright Michael Healey, mocks Canada's two solitudes. Out here, however, B.C. watches aloof and from afar. If that makes us a third solitude, then what does it make a theatre company in North Vancouver that has decided to mount a play with French and English subtitles all about the Quebec separatist movement today -- and maybe tomorrow?

Production House Theatre is staging all the angst and absurdities of a fractured Canadian state. Written and performed in Canada's two languages with a title that means the same in French as it does in English, you know the show isn't about birth control. But is it relevant to a B.C. audience? The director thinks so, but only because Plan B is like getting a dispatch from the other side of the continent, which it is.

The play imagines a future where Quebec has separated from Canada. Set in a boardroom in Hull, Quebec, the audience witnesses four politicians as they negotiate currency, water rights and national debt. Sounds like Constitutional Poli Sci 101, but Plan B is a comedy. The play lets us see what we're most afraid of (at least if you're a federalist) and is set in the weeks following a referendum wherein 53 per cent of Quebec voters say yes to sovereignty. It's funny because it hurts.

Is BC even listening?

In the opening scene, a Trudeau-era, socialist-leaning Saskatchewan senator tells the Quebec Premier -- who is now the leader of an independent Quebec -- that he's a big, fat jerk. (You can trust me when I say his words are decidedly more profane.) As the senator is red-faced and shouting, a French translation of his verbal vitriol is flashed on a screen to the audience's left. If you speak French, the translated subtitles will make you laugh. If you don't -- oh well, you understood the English insult in the first place.

The question driving Plan B -- and there are only questions, no answers provided here -- has to do with how well Canadians understand each other. Yet, not all of us are part of the conversation. Plan B shows us only two kinds of Canadian: the Quebecois sovereignist and the federalist Parliamentarian. If we're asking how well these people understand what the other has to say, we should ask if B.C. is even listening.

Count the play's director, Bill Devine, among those who think British Columbians are not paying attention to the conversation about Quebec's separatist sentiment. "I don't think they're engaged at all," he said. "I think we live a world away." For Devine, who grew up in Burnaby and does not speak a lick of French beyond, "I can say, 'Bonjour,'" Plan B is like checking out the politics of a foreign nation -- albeit one that governs over him from afar.

"The political situation [in Canada] has always been very much focused in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec," he said. "As someone from British Columbia, the play does resonate with me because it gives me a better idea what the political climate is 3,000 miles away."

French and British colonial histories are a defining point of present-day Canadian politics if you're campaigning for office in Montreal. If your interests are drawn elsewhere, Plan B is less likely to grip you.

Naïvité is a French word

Devine has cast France Perras in the role of Lise. A sovereignist Quebecois bureaucrat and the script's only woman, Lise is an intelligent and beguiling flirt who stands as a metaphor for the province she's guiding to independence. The stereotype of la belle province as a demanding woman ruled by passion over logic is insulting at best, but Plan B gets interesting when Lise and Michael Fraser, the prime minister in waiting, move from the bilingual bureaucracy of the boardroom to a more intimate place where they can practice other kinds of French tongue-twisters. While her feelings slowly warm towards him, Michael quickly professes his love for her (and by extension, Quebec society, language and culture). He comes on hard like puberty has just struck, and she rebuffs him each time he tells her -- emphatically -- "I think you’re just fantastic!" He finds a better word and begins to describe Lise and her state's qualities as ébouillante.

Flipping through your pocked French-English dictionary? That's the point. Watching Plan B, not everyone is privy to the joke although sometimes you're left to feel you are the joke. In this country of regions and nations, we do not share a mother tongue and will not always understand each other, says Perras, who plays Lise with flawless Quebecois and English. A bi-cultural, bilingual Ontario Francophone living in Vancouver, Perras says the nuanced comedy and heightened sensitivities of the script will not resonate with a unilingual theatre-goer in Western Canada as it would a bilingual spectator in Montreal or Ottawa.

Why?

"Because B.C. doesn't know," she said. "We are on the other side of the country. A lot of Vancouver -- I should be careful how I say this and I'm generalizing -- but it's one thing to read or hear about it, but is another to live it." Plan B is "absolutely" a different play depending on where it's staged, said Perras. "It is such a delicate topic back east, whereas for B.C., a lot of people don't really know the meaning of the weight that the subject can carry."

Separatism 'written in our genes'

Perras said a Quebecois friend of hers had to leave the theatre immediately after having seen a performance. Following a rant about "the stupid French," the sovereignist responds that Quebec is distinct from English Canada and while it shares a common history and a language, "France does not set our moral compass."

This statement also stuck with Perras. "I'm not separatist at all but it's something that has been instilled within us that is almost written in our genes. It's bizarre and is only my point of view, but it's something [that] stems so far back, I've often said that the Plains of Abraham are almost coursing through my veins. It's something I can't explain and I might react and I don't know why."

Perras said the play served as some kind of catharsis, allowing her to revisit the moment 15 years ago when Canada nearly fractured. In her role as a sovereignist civil servant, she tapped into a memory of dozens of busses leaving Ottawa loaded with federalists hell-bent on urging Quebecois to vote No and stay.

"Sometimes I see a pattern of some people having come out here to get away because it was such an ugly battle," she said, adding that she's noticed there is a community of exiles throughout B.C. that don't self-impose any pressure to declare themselves Yes or No for an independent Quebec. "You could get earmarked as either or -- and you may not always be able to find your place."

In one scene at the boardroom table, the PM-to-be Michael Fraser shows how quickly an allegiance can be betrayed. After begging the sovereignists to defy the mandate of Quebec voters and remain part of Canada, Michael accepts that his Dominion is being rejected and instead of courting their favour, suddenly seeks to punish the independent Quebec through hard politics penalties like sanctions and border control. He pleads with them, "Don't go," and then betrays his own gesture to spit, essentially, get lost and good riddance. His infatuation with Lise crumbles in a similar fashion.

Like a Panama-born hockey-player trapping fur in Lebanon

Devine says he was driven to direct Plan B because it would be a challenge to stage a play in two languages and because the playwright is Canadian. He first saw a Canadian play on a Canadian stage as a teenager in 1967 when he took in a production written by his uncle, George Ryga who wrote The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Experimental in structure, the play broached the highly charged story of a young aboriginal woman who leaves her reserve for a life under big city lights. ("Ecstasy" alludes to a martyr's enlightened euphoria when she meets her god, foretelling the tragedy of Ryga's protagonist and a social justice system that is neither just nor in service of all of society.) In 1984, a New York Times critic wrote, "Just when it seems as though every conceivable subject has been explored in depth on the New York stage, along comes The Ecstasy of Rita Joe to prove us wrong."

It would be another 20 years before Devine saw a second Canadian play on a provincial stage. "They just didn't do Canadian," he said. "Nobody would take the chance to do a Canadian play. They just didn't feel that an audience was there." Indeed, stated one prestigious U.S. theatre writer, "'Canadian Playwright.' The words seem a little incongruous together, like 'Panamanian hockey-player,' almost or 'Lebanese fur-trapper.'"

Devine, it would seem, is showing his commitment to Canadian theatre but not necessarily to all B.C. spectators. As Colin Thomas lamented in the Georgia Straight, "If you're like me, and you're sick to death of discussing what feels like a dead issue, then Plan B will mostly annoy you despite the strengths in [the] production."

Bye bye, mon cowboy

Although a bilingual audience may catch more nuance and humour between the spoken language and written text, the actors cast in Plan B are charged with making sure the audience knows what the hell is going on. The intentions of a character can still be made clear to the spectator whose French education culminated with a 1980s pop song played on MuchMusic. A pair of season ticket holders at a production on a Saturday night had no idea the play was partly in French. They say it didn't pose a problem but they confessed to working with "just what I picked up in high school." Language did not hinder the politics, according to another anglophone in the audience, who said the subject will resonate with any Canadian who is politically engaged.

Jacques Lalonde plays the premier of Quebec -- rather, former premier, now the leader of an independent Quebec -- a character who cannot push out the sound made at the front of the words "hostile" and "hurtful." Said Lalonde, "Putting two languages on stage, is at the heart of what the play is about," he said. "Do we really understand each other?"

That aspects of the bilingual production will fly over the heads of some Vancouver and B.C. audiences alludes to the very national bifurcation addressed in the play. This is part of the charm and challenge of Canada's two (or more) solitudes. "I think that's what [playwright] Michael Healey is trying to do," surmised Devine. "He's not trying to bring us into a world of political ideology. He's trying to bring us into a world where a relationship is falling apart."

Plan B is produced by Sea Theatre and continues at Presentation House Theatre until Saturday, May 29.