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The Madonna Painter
By Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau
Directed by Eda Holmes

Until Dec. 13 at The Factory Theatre, Toronto

The English language premiere of The Madonna Painter opened recently at Toronto’s Factory Theatre. It is the second play in the theatre’s 40th Anniversary Season of new Canadian work.

The Madonna Painter is not, in fact, entirely a new work: originally written in French by Québécois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, it was translated into Italian for its first production in Florence in 2003, and Linda Gaboriau’s recent English language translation, was commissioned in 2008.  

Bouchard’s play is set in 1918 in the Lac St-Jean region of rural Québec; the story revolves around the village priest, doctor and a group of young women all conveniently named Mary. The priest (played by Marc Bendavid), a newcomer to the village, decides that the best way to ward off a creeping Spanish Flu epidemic is through the commissioning of a painting for the church, a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary that can function as a sort of aesthetic firewall from the virus while simultaneously providing comfort to the community in its time of need.

With the local doctor (Brian Dooley) acting as benefactor, the priest is able to secure the services of a wandering Italian artist (Juan Chioran) who insists that he select his model from the young women of the village. This premise of the foreign artist selecting his “virgin” from the community was a key source of inspiration for Bouchard in writing the play; a similar event occurred in his own Lac St-Jean parish in the 1950s and his recollections of what happens when high-minded art comes to a small God-fearing town became his starting point.

The endeavour to have the Madonna fresco come into being acts as the catalyst for a narrative which unfolds as the canvas Bouchard uses for his fable-like exploration of fear and desire, and an almost hermeneutic pursuit of truth as it may or may not appear in the work of art.

In its structure, the story has all the key elements of standard Canadian fare: the handsome, young, devout priest new to town, played against the local, irreverent (and creepy) doctor who holds the financial power to make the painting happen. Enter the suave Italian painter to throw the town into disarray and a Cinderella-esque selection of the least likely candidate to be his model, and The Madonna Painter might appear as a contemporary Canadian historical drama worthy of a CBC Sunday night movie.

But Michel Marc Bouchard has more in mind than that with his piece, calling the play “A bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.” He uses the setting of spirituality and fear as they existed in rural Québec near the end of the First World War, and in the face of a large pandemic, merely as the backdrop for his parable, a meta-narrative where the characters become the echoes of those people who inhabited the rural village that inspired his story.  

The elements of a classic fable are most evident in the characterization of the women in the play, the four Marys, who are each depicted with a special burden/talent: Mary Frances (Miranda Edwards) is a sensual, uninhibited storyteller, while Mary Anne (Shannon Taylor) is innocent and gullible, believing everything she hears; Mary Louise (Nicola Correia-Damude) has the ability to understand people by reading of the lines left in their bedding and Mary of the Secrets (Jenny Young) carries the darkest final words from the dying to a burial ground hidden deep in the forest. The symbolic presence of these women, which vacillates throughout from Greek chorus to coven, provides an almost magical quality to the narrative.

The set (designed by Sue LePage) serves this mystical quality of the play; the stage is encircled in a permanent state of nighttime forest darkness that becomes the site for the undoing of the Marys; their passion plays are carried out along the edges of the story. The central focus is on the interaction between the priest, doctor, and painter, most often in the indoors, within the wooden, rustic austerity of the church or doctor’s office as the characters undertake a battle of good versus evil. 

The characters each character has within them a certain wildness that is juxtaposed with their own particular brand of faith, the dance of the two creating the threads that weave together to tell the story, and the actors in the production certainly do an outstanding job in carrying out that task.

There are many threads to this fable, each unwinding and intertwining with others, offering the potential for a gorgeous piece of terrible beauty. But as a parable, the language of the play, meant to have a lyrical quality, often goes astray and it is quite possible that something of the desire for a poetic take on human nature has gotten lost in translation, a loss not only of the words but of the cultural context within which they are delivered.

Thematic tropes that lead us to the larger or more significant story being told might not translate so well from a rural Québec milieu to the urban Toronto one. The implicit understanding of the intersection between faith and superstition, as it existed at the time and place of the play, is built into the original language – a language with a lexicon of expletives based entirely on intricacies of Catholic dogma, and one that only serves to deepen the social significance of the faith in that region.

Or is it that the threads of the story get lost in the attempt to weaving them together? The details of the story itself interrupts the telling of it as a fable and the lesson gets lost in the narrative’s gaps. The lack of common sense in the behaviour of the citizens isn’t provided with enough cushioning to allow for a suspension of disbelief. Where is a practical, caustic grand-mère to shake a fist at the doctor for his gross violations? The practicalities lacking in the plot of the story disrupt the ability for the meta-narrative, the story as fable, to have the sublime quality, or “the clash of ecstasies” as Bouchard describes it, in its final outcome. The ugliness we are meant to experience in the pursuit of beauty isn’t quite a clash. The strength of the production might very well be in director Holmes’ choreographic sensibilities and in the subtleties of movement and placement in the revelation of the story’s major themes; the women creep through dark trees on the edge looking towards the light of the centre, while the men maintain the centre, steadily becoming darker, and thus rendering a bitter outcome for everyone.

In the end, the truth in this work of art is that people fall victim to the most mundane perils of the world – to their vanities, their lust, their ego, their faith or loss of it. The men judge each other in the battles of good against evil, and the women are left, as usual, to leap into space.

The Madonna Painter continues at Factory Theatre until December 13. An English Language production is slated for March 2010 at the Centaur Theatre  in Montreal.