Lifedream by Hérménegilde Chiasson, translated by Jo-Anne Elder

In this poetic theatrical piece, Solange, Thomas, Gabrielle, and Paul represent four different ways of life and four different elements of existence which play out over fourteen tableaux. As they move among the spaces of dreams and of the real world of hospital rooms, bars, galleries and classrooms, Herménégilde Chiasson's characters confront an overwhelming range of questions, from sex to death, from money to marriage, from the Acadian Expulsion to the Book of Psalms. The human body and soul, heart and mind interact without ever fully managing to reach each other.

NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival, TNB, Fredericton, NB, 2007.

Director

Writer: Herménégilde Chiasson
Translated by Jo-Anne Elder
Directed by Emma Tibaldo
Set Design: Mike Johnston
Lighting Design: Chris Saad
Sound Design: Mike Doherty
Cast: Caleb Marshall, Mélanie LeBlanc, Wally Mckinnon, Rea Nolan

Lifedream
By Herménégilde Chiasson, translated by Jo-Anne Elder
NotaBle Acts Summer Theatre Festival
July 2007
Review by Ross Hunt, Ross Hunt's Reviews
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So there's this couple whose marriage is pretty much an empty shell. He's a money-obsessed, insensitive philistine with a wandering eye; she's an educated, sensitive but repressed wife. He's having an affair with a sexy free spirit who's just decided to break it off because she's "met someone." Her brother, a priest, is struggling with the temptations of the flesh in the person of . . . guess who? the stalwart wife.
Sounds a bit soap operaish, doesn't it? But the production of Herménégilde Chiasson's thoughtful script -- elegantly translated by Jo-Anne Elder -- that has been put together by this summer's NotaBle Acts Festival is an enchanting, and even mesmerizing, evening of theatre: a feast for the eyes and ears and surprisingly often a challenge to our minds and to our emotions.
Rarely, in my experience, have the considerable resources of the Playhouse been used so productively to surround and support a script without overwhelming it or its language, without making something delicate and subtle into something larger and coarser. In part, this is a result of using the intimate setting of the backstage space, where the space is smaller but the resources are as accessible: but it is also a result of a tactful deployment of those resources, particularly, in this case, lighting and sound. The soundscape, by the always reliable Mike Doherty, not only set the tone brilliantly at the outset, it also subtly supported the actors throughout -- for instance, the subtle thunderstorm (can there be such a thing? Go to the Playhouse and see) and all the other recorded offstage sounds which often underscored, but never obscured, the action of the play. Mike Johnston's elegantly simple multileveled playing space provided a powerful underpainting for Chris Saad's thoughtful and precise lighting (the offstage lightning for the distant storm, for example, or the way a stained-glass window splashed its colors on the center of the stage in the final scene), which invited us to shift our attention gradually rather than suddenly from one scene to the next, and synchronized with the subtle shifts from one to another of the effective and often lovely back projections contributing to the dreamlike mood of the play.
Those scenes, fourteen of them, each with a floating and floaty surtitle ("Gold and the weight of life," "Despair as a way of life," "Intelligence as an escape system") might have seemed simply one damn thing after another, except for director Emma Tibaldo's elegant shaping and timing of the production. The transitions between scenes were neatly contrived to make the scenes feel connected, to give us the sense of one, whole, slow-motion movement through the play. Regularly, the characters in a scene, as the lights went down on them, devolved into something between mime and dance and slow-motion, and expressed with their bodies the trajectories of the emotions and relationships in the scene, and gradually disappeared as our attention pulled away from them and the lights came up on the next scene. Changes of props regularly were made part of these transitions, as characters carried off a bench as though struggling under the weight of a cross. Made focal, these might have seemed almost silly, but the fact that they were occurring at the periphery of our vision, as we looked for the entrances of new characters, made them part of the whole coherent atmosphere of the production, tying it all together into one dreamlike experience. As the surtitles of scenes appeared on the back projection, voice-over recordings (which, similarly, might have seemed silly but for their part in the transition) introduced scenes with short, poetic meditations on the issues -- "One day we will be vaccinated against thirst," one says, "One day we will take misery in hand / One day we will trade stars for space."...

Mike Johnston