The Madonna Painter

April 27 & 28, 2010 - Damon L. Jacobs
Jean Leclerc - Interview

Picture, if you will, an era in which daytime television made an abundance of money, actors were hired more for talent than looks, and time and energy were channeled into fostering complex character developments and intelligent writing. Jean LeClerc was one of the profiteers and then one of the casualties of this special era of the 1980's in which daytime thrived on quality and integrity. Please join me for this special interview as he discusses his current role in Montreal in "The Madonna Painter," and then recalls his highs and lows on ABC daytime between 1985-1995.

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The Madonna Painter

April 2, 2010 - Pat Donnelly
Review: The Madonna Painter

If every young girl wanted to be the Madonna in rural Quebec in 1918, what about the secretly gay young men?

Did their fantasies include incarnating Our Lady of the Assumption? Were the roles of the male saints in local religious pageants not enough?

Playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, who scored a triumph with his Les Feluettes (Lilies) in 1987, mixing up a miracle play (The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian) with a same-gender Romeo and Juliet story, has written yet another startling piece that revels in the dark side of religion.

It begins with a young priest (Graham Cuthbertson) who has arrived in the remote village of St. Coeur de Marie describing his vision of the triptych featuring the Blessed Virgin, which he is determined to commission for the local church. He believes it will stave off the ravages of the Spanish flu pandemic.

“Her closed lips will seal all secrets and mysteries,” he says. “Her eyes will comfort us.”

Turns out he has that kind of face himself. And the local doctor (Jean Leclerc), who has a bedside manner akin to Jack the Ripper, finds himself captivated by it. He agrees to fund the fresco, using a ring ripped from an amputated hand as down payment.

As for the other panels, the priest is still taking notes. After encountering a pair of silly young girls, Mary Frances (Stefanie Buxton) and Mary Ann (Amelia Sargisson) in the woods, he writes: “The left panel of the fresco will depict two young women on the bank of a stream. In the distance, a man is bathing, as naked as the day he is born.”

In this bizarre micro-parish, the play’s four young women (all Marys), who face a severe shortage of eligible men at a time when women’s career options were nil, are beckoned to an audition. The commissioned Italian painter, Alessandro (Alessandro Juliani) must choose his Madonna model, with the help of the naive priest and depraved doctor.

No crystal ball needed to see where this is going. Yet Bouchard surprises with more twists than plot. Tortured pre-Vatican II Catholicism meets the Theatre of the Absurd in a play that the playwright describes as a “collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

The doctor’s wry comments are the saving diversion of the Madonna Painter. Leclerc handles the most bloodthirsty scenes with palpable menace and obvious relish.

Cuthbertson, as the priest, is a genuine revelation, fanatically earnest one moment, broken the next.

The female performers must make surreal sense of the odd behaviours imposed on their plaster-cast characters. There’s something borrowed from Arthur Miller’s the Crucible here, but not enough.

Chambermaid Mary Louise (Lucinda Davis) reads dirty sheets like tea leaves, divining the personalities of those who used them. Meg Roe touches an ethereal note in her portrayal of Mary of the Secrets, the painter’s chosen model.

Juliani slips back and forth between Italian and English, engaging the audience with ease as the minor da Vinci.

Director Roy Surrette has used dim lights, a dripping tap, and a curved backdrop to create an eerie atmosphere.

Wrestling with the meaning of this enigmatic, macabre piece can lead to migraines. Think Mona Lisa, and smile.

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The Madonna Painter

April 2, 2010 -
Marianne Ackerman
High on incence

If theatre is the Vatican of Quebec, Michel Marc Bouchard is definitely a high-ranking cardinal. The sheer ambition of his sprawling frescos is enough to strike awe in an audience, as it did on opening night of The Madonna Painter at the Centaur.

Bouchard is the literary equivalent of Robert Lepage, the Quebec master of visual theatre. He gathers up rich ideas, characters, settings, bits of history and images, and shakes, rattles, transforms them by way of poetic language into a series of powerful individual scenes which, if staged as exquisitely as director Roy Surette has done, can be impressive and at some moments, quite gripping.

Watching a young girl whip a half-naked priest, especially in the same week we’ve been forced to hear still more about the sexual abuse scandal hitting Catholic clergy, makes it impossible not to think of that sad reality. (Though there is little evidence in the play to suggest the author is critical of either priests or whipping.)

The plot: 1918, a young priest arrives in a small Quebec town and hears that English (meaning English-speaking Canadian) soldiers are spreading the Spanish flu. In an effort to contain the epidemic, he commissions an Italian artist to paint a triptych of the Madonna which he is sure will ward off the plague. This being wartime, the village is full of man-starved young girls, one of whom will have the privilege of posing for the painting. The artist requires a virgin, but does everything in his power to render his choice otherwise.

The plays of Spanish master Federico Garcia Lorca come to mind, except that this plot is relentlessly episodic, not dramatic. When it all ends badly, the audience may be shocked, but it’s a distant, theoretical state of mind, not a feeling. Never for a moment are we encouraged to forget this is all just actors putting on a play. The sense of cast and audience going through an ordeal together is missing, because the playwright himself in not interested in re-creating reality, or forging a plot driven forward by fully engaged characters.

From Bouchard’s programme note: “The language of the play is not that of its inhabitants. My characters simply echo the medieval beliefs that shaped their destiny until recently … It is a collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

The problem with this play (if there is a problem) is the same one that affects Bouchard’s other plays – and for that matter, most of the post-’68 Quebecois canon: the dramatic structure, even the aesthetic, relies on the Latin mass for inspiration. All that Aristotle and his progeny preached, down to the current living master, David Mamet, has been soundly ignored. This is why we come away from this and so many other Quebec plays impressed, but not moved. Why we know nothing of Michel Marc Bouchard accept his taste – he worships art, beauty, purity, pain. The rest is banal.

Centaur’s production is excellent, the set by Pierre-Etienne Locas a stunning bit of modern architecture, a modern museum piece, using antiques as furniture and props hinting at some tasteful reconciliation with a bad time long ago.

Watching this play, we see how fully the collective Quebec psyche has and has not rid itself of that “medieval” era. “The Church” is an artefact, its sting no longer able to arouse rage. Life is not a contest, à la Aeschylus or Mamet, whether nasty, brutish or short. It is an exquisite, unchanging agony, at best endured on our knees.

The Madonna Painter is well worth seeing. A brave choice for Centaur, ably upheld by cast and crew, it is stiff corrective to the modest comic-dramas that all too often make the rounds of major Canadian stages.

Let it wash over you. Don’t try to find the logos, the cogent intelligence, the hand-of-god-the-author behind it all. Enjoy the spectacle, and trust that some day all will be revealed.

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The Madonna Painter

April 11, 2010 -
Michaela Di Cesare
Beauty and Disease:
The Madonna Painter truly captivates

The Centaur Theatre appropriately opened the penultimate show of its season on Holy Thursday with Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Madonna Painter: Birth of a Painting under the direction of Roy Surette. Bouchard is a prolific Québecois playwright whose works have brought our unique culture abroad, having been translated into nine languages. In this poetic and evocative piece, Bouchard weaves the tale of a young priest brought to a small town in Lac Saint-Jean in the fall of 1918 to instil hope in a small population ravaged both by war and an outbreak of the Spanish Flu.

The spiritual leader commissions an Italian painter to create a triptych depicting the Virgin Mary as a means to ward off the pandemic and restore faith to the inhabitants of the village, including a doctor of questionable moral standards with a taste for butchery. The young girls of the village are man-starved nymphettes thinking almost exclusively of marital bliss. The painter must select one of them to pose as the Madonna and nearly everyone is shocked when he selects Mary of the Secrets, a stigmatised member of the society who is believed to have a divine gift.

What follows is a story that follows the old creative writing adage “show and don’t tell” almost to a fault. Bouchard’s stunning scenes give us tableaus of beautiful images and elaborate language that are truly captivating. What is lost to this style is a strong dramatic impetus because the audience is appreciating each scene separately as one would a painting without tension necessarily building up between them. We must applaud Linda Garboriau’s translation because she brings the imagery in Bouchard’s language to life, making use of such tropes as repetition without making any of the word choices seem heavy or inaccurate.

The performances of the young horny village girls (stand outs Stefanie Buxton, Luncinda Davis and Amelia Sargisson) are breaths of fresh air when we can literally smell the putrid scent of decaying, disease ridden corpses thanks to Bouchard’s poetic morbidity. Without them, the play would quickly feel like a sermon, and an awfully depressing one at that. Jean Leclerc delivers a chilling performance as the enigmatic Doctor who recognizes the destructive power beauty can hold when it represent s an unattainable ideal as symbolized by Graham Cutherbertson’s role of The Young Priest. Moreover, The Doctor represents our human drive to destroy beauty and render it profane rather than try to ascend to the ranks of the sacred. Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe as the worldly painter and his virgin model bring startling intensity and chemistry to the stage that one would not expect from their first encounter.

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The Madonna Painter

April 1, 2010 - Neil Boyce
Immaculate production

His work has been translated into 10 languages, he’s won every major theatre award in Canada and Quebec (and several abroad), has had his plays made into films, and was made Officer of the Order of Canada in 2005. All to say, Michel Marc Bouchard’s a big deal in theatre—and a work staged here in English for the first time is also a big deal.

Roy Surette directs The Madonna Painter (subtitled The Birth of a Painting) for Centaur, his cast a mix of talented Montreal stage actors, TV veterans and two Vancouver artists (Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe) who—and this must be a first—also wrote the sound and music for the piece.

Set in Lac Saint-Jean following the First World War, Bouchard’s story centres on a young priest (played by Graham Cuthbertson) seeking an intervention, divine or otherwise, to save the tiny town from a looming Spanish flu epidemic. He commissions a visiting artist (Juliani) to paint an image of the Virgin Mary, and the artist in turn begins a search for a perfect model among the townspeople: he finds four village women, all named Mary, each of whom claims to have received a vision.

The cast and director have just moved from rehearsal room to the Centaur stage, with Pierre-Etienne Locas’s abstract, organic set made of water, metal and earth now in place. The chief difference? “There’s more places now to fall down,” Surette quips.

Toronto’s Factory Theatre scooped the Centaur by a few months with their recent premiere, but The Madonna Painter already had a circuitous history, starting out in Italian in 2002, sponsored by Florence’s Teatro della Limonaia, where Bouchard was artist-in-residence. The playwright later brought the French version home to rave reviews at Espace GO. Now, after a successful Toronto run, it opens at last, in what seems a peculiar Montreal phenomenon, in English in Quebec.

“Bouchard took the opportunity,” Surette says, “as he often does when translating a work, to rewrite it a lot, so there’s quite a few major changes to the work that was done here in French.”

“I love his plays,” Surette adds. “They’re exotic, they’re operatic—they provide all sorts of ambitious challenges for actors, directors and designers.”

Stefanie Buxton, playing the mayor’s daughter and one of the “Marys,” is overjoyed. “I love it. Earlier, I was saying to Jean Leclerc,” who, Buxton explains, plays a sinister doctor named The Butcher, “not to sound too flaky, but it’s a dream come true for me. I’ve always wanted to do a Michel Marc Bouchard play.”

They’re at the point, she continues, where they can’t wait for it to begin. “We’re getting excited to share this. We’re still tweaking and figuring things out, but we need to start getting people in the house. It feels like that time is coming. It’s good.”

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The Madonna Painter

April 1, 2010 - Pat Donnelly
Actor in Centaur's Madonna Painter has cred - Jean Lecler played role of doctor in TV soaps - and he studied pre-med.

Actor Jean Leclerc, who spent a significant part of his career gazing deep into the eyes of Erica Kane (Susan Lucci), among others, in the American soap opera All My Children, is now demonstrating his bedside manner as the village doctor in Michel Marc Bouchard's The Madonna Painter at Centaur Theatre.

His previous experience in the medical profession includes pre-med studies long ago, as well as a stint on another daytime series The Doctors - yet another of his sudsy credits along with As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, and Loving.

An instinctive actor who started young and learned on the job, Leclerc likes to keep up his legit theatre credentials - which include a season at Stratford.

When he last performed at Centaur, in 1996, he had just returned from the U.S., after more than a decade, in order to "take a break and re-evaluate my craft," he said at the time. The role that had tempted him was that of God, in The Visitor, by Parisian playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

Now he's playing a more down-to-earth, less sympathetic role. A general practitioner wearing a blood-stained apron.

"He's known as more of a butcher than a doctor," Leclerc said of his character, as he settled into a Centaur lobby chair for an interview this week - wearing full costume, apron, spats and all.

In The Madonna Painter, the time is 1918, and the Spanish flu epidemic is raging in rural Quebec, including the village of Ste. Couer de Marie in the Lac St. Jean region. The local priest hopes that commissioning a painting of the Virgin Mary will help to protect his parish. The doctor is called upon to bankroll the project, which he does, with mixed motives. While the flu wreaks havoc, it also offers the unscrupulous doctor an opportunity to purse his personal quest.

"He would like to find the human soul," said Leclerc, "It's his Holy Grail. He would like to see it. And to get there, he will stop at nothing."

The bloodthirsty doc begins to sound a bit like another role Leclerc once played on Broadway: Dracula, in 1979, replacing Raul Julia, who had taken over from Frank Langella.

Although he hasn't performed live in Montreal in English since 1996, Leclerc, 61, has since done many theatre roles here in French (as well as working in film and television in both languages, including an appearance in the series Les Bougon). Over the past decade, he has also taken up directing - at Canadian Stage in Toronto, as well as in Montreal. A dual citizen, he has built a unique border-hopping career and continues to maintain an apartment in New York City.

His home digs,however, are in a renovated circa 1820 flour mill - with a waterfall in the living room - in the Eastern Townships. "I'm very honoured," he said. "Because last year it was declared a historical monument. I'm very proud they've recognized it."

Leclerc's future plans? The deal hasn't been inked yet. But it looks like he could be spending a season in Ottawa.

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Playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, who stopped by Centaur to check out the rehearsal, reminded me that the Madonna Painter had had its premiere in Florence, Italy, in Italian, in 2003. Which makes it something of a rarity within Quebec theatre. Its French premiere took place at Espace Go in Montreal in April 2004. The English version, translated by Linda Gaboriau, premiered in Toronto at Factory Theatre last November.

Why Gaboriau? "We've developed a strong relationship over 20 years now," he said.

Having a play directed by Roy Surette is nothing new either. "This is my third encounter with Roy," Bouchard said. Surette directed his The Lilies at the Vancouver Arts Club Theatre and his The Coronation Voyage, at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria. Surette also produced Bouchard's The Orphan Muses for Vancouver's Touchstone Theatre. "We have a long history," he said.

Bouchard's next play, Tom à la ferme,will premiere Jan. 11, 2011, at Théâtre d'aujourd'hui, under the direction of Claude Poissant. Bouchard has also been busy as a curator (for museums) and has completed the screenplay for Queen Kristina, which will be directed by Mika Kaurismaki and star Sarah Polley as the 17th-century Swedish royal.