May 25, 2010 - Jean Siag
Trudeau Stories : confidences sans oreiller

Le one woman show de Brooke Johnson au Centaur Theatre a tôt fait d'intriguer le public et la critique sur ces confidences, apparemment véridiques, de l'auteure et comédienne à propos de sa relation amicale avec l'ex-premier ministre canadien Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Le résultat est assez étonnant. Oui, on peut parler de performance théâtrale, mais le récit hyper réaliste de cette improbable rencontre nous est conté sur le ton de la confidence habituellement réservé aux vieux amis. Ce qui fait qu'on a plus l'impression d'être en chaussettes dans le salon de Brooke qu'au théâtre.

Nous sommes en 1985. Brooke Johnson fréquente l'École nationale de théâtre du Canada (dans la section anglaise, à Montréal). La jeune femme, qui siège au CA de l'École à titre de représentante des élèves, est invitée à un gala à l'occasion du 25e anniversaire de l'ENT.

C'est là qu'elle fait la connaissance de Pierre Trudeau. Elle n'a alors que 23 ans. Lui travaille dans un cabinet d'avocats depuis qu'il a quitté la vie politique un an plus tôt. Il a près de 65 ans. Tout de suite, l'esprit et l'humour (et bien sûr tout le reste) de la jeune Brooke attirent l'attention de Trudeau.

C'est le point de départ d'une relation amicale ambiguë, qui n'est pas une romance, mais qui n'est pas non plus totalement innocente.

C'est que l'homme derrière le politique avait du charme. Et de la culture. On imagine mal notre premier ministre Stephen Harper discuter de l'art de la prose, des poèmes de W.B. Yeats ou des pièces de Tchekhov... Ce que Trudeau savait faire avec éloquence. Et un sens de la répartie assez redoutable.

Incursion intime

Ces Trudeau Stories sont en fait une étrange incursion dans l'intimité de cette femme aujourd'hui âgée de 48 ans. Je dis étrange, parce qu'on peut ressentir, malgré notre curiosité, un certain malaise lorsque Brooke Johnson nous lit des extraits de son journal intime ou de sa correspondance avec PET.

Bien sûr, notre côté voyeur prend le dessus. Et puis Trudeau était une personnalité publique incontournable. On se régale donc de ces histoires très personnelles qui le concernent, c'est évident. Mais l'on est quand même porté à se demander quel est l'intérêt de ces confidences.

Au fond, ce qui est touchant et universel (jusqu'à un certain point), c'est l'histoire d'amitié entre ces deux êtres que tout oppose. Elle, une jeune comédienne en devenir sans le sou; lui, un ex-chef d'État fortuné à l'âge de la retraite. Et la richesse de leurs échanges. C'est là la grande force de Trudeau Stories.

Manifestement, cette amitié, qui a duré jusqu'à la mort de PET en 2000, a marqué la vie de Brooke Johnson, qui nous entraîne avec humour et sensibilité dans les recoins du Vieux-Montréal avec toute la fébrilité qu'elle a dû ressentir vis-à-vis de ce grand séducteur devant l'éternel, qui s'est intéressé à elle.

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May 20, 2010 - Neil Boyce
My famous friend

Brooke Johnson was in her second year at the National Theatre School when the institution had its 25th anniversary gala in 1985. While she was eyeing the lavish buffet, a man walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Pierre Trudeau” and asked for a dance. And from their initial waltz—with Johnson terrified she’d fall out of the borrowed, oversized pumps she’d stuffed with toilet paper—a friendship began.

From their back and forth correspondence, phone messages, and adventures over several years, Johnson created Trudeau Stories. The solo show she performs is a fascinating memory play, sketching an intensely personal picture of a complex man. The scourge of Western farmers, Quebec nationalists, and hapless journalists everywhere, Trudeau was fiercely loved, idolized even, by many others. Yet even after the many books by and about him, several TV series and documentaries, and a movie, there remains an enigmatic aura around our most famous Prime Minister.

After their initial meeting, Trudeau mentioned he’d love to go to the theatre with the young actress. Johnson, aware of his reputation as a Lothario and worried she might end up another brief conquest, writes him an awkward “just friends” letter.

Despite the immense shadow cast by her friend, Johnson is more than a note-taking spectator in the piece. It’s seen through their shared interests: nature, theatre, poetry and good conversation. From their initial encounter (she remarks, “I had no idea how freckled he was”), Johnson fills her recollection with quirky details: out for a walk, the young actress and much older ex-PM, clad in a long black coat and beaver hat, slid playfully on a patch of ice.

Perhaps it was a romance, she confesses, but the platonic Boy’s Own kind, as they hiked across Mount-Royal or palled around the city. When she recreates Trudeau in a phrase or joking reply, Johnson has it down cold: the cadence, the drawn out words, the sly delivery of our former philosopher king, it all emerges as a palpable presence on stage. Johnson mimics, “Welllll, I don’t know...” and gives a familiar shrug, vividly capturing his unique style. Later, after her career had become busy with performances here and abroad, their friendship wanes and she confesses, “I curse myself for letting so much time slip by.”

Directed by Allyson McMackon, the play is only now making a Montreal appearance since its 2007 SummerWorks premiere in Toronto. Strange, because it screams of Montreal in a particular era, with recollections of Bistro Alexandre, Centaur Theatre, and other old hot spots that will resonate with many.

Johnson doesn’t give in to easy nostalgia in her penetrating sketch, focusing instead on an urbane and playful man, utterly at ease in his skin. Her last remembrance, as she sits in a bar near the Notre Dame Basilica watching Trudeau’s funeral on TV, brought to mind the words of commentator Michael Adams when he summed up the turbulent Trudeau era: “He represented the high mark of Canadian idealism,” he wrote. “Love him or hate him, we are all Trudeau’s children.”

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Trudeau Stories

May 12, 2010 - Michaela Di Cesare
No politics and plenty of heart

Centaur Theatre’s last show of their 2009-2010 season is Trudeau Stories, written and performed by Brooke Johnson and directed by Allyson McMackon.  Johnson is a graduate of Montreal’s own National Theatre School of Canada, where she studied acting. It was also while attending this institution that Johnson met the living legend Pierre Trudeau. She was twenty-three years old at the time and he was in his mid-sixties. The unlikely friendship blossomed immediately.
Anyone as jaded as I probably am would immediately suspect the renowned womanizer was simply looking to add another notch to his belt, but Johnson quickly dispels these wicked thoughts in her piece and makes you feel guilty for thinking them in the first place. She assures us that the two of them were merely lonely souls coming together to talk about literature and theatre.  Johnson’s delivery was familiar yet entertaining. She often made us forget that she was speaking of an extraordinary relationship with a Canadian icon, instead taking on the nostalgic tone with which we would speak when recalling our first friend in kindergarten. The show was well-paced and at one hour and fifteen minutes never dragged. If anything the ending, depicting Johnson’s feelings while standing outside Trudeau’s funeral celebration, came too suddenly, managing to shock us with information we all knew to be historically factual.

Trudeau Stories is Johnson’s first piece of writing for the stage and she definitely writes like a performer, which is what makes this piece so strong. Johnson knows what’s interesting, both visually and aurally and she also has a firm grasp on what she enjoys playing which means that she was at home with every line in this play, an unusual luxury for most actors.

The set was entirely composed of a single chair and a floor painting made to resemble a carpet. The painting, done by Lindsay Anne Black, had a high transformative power, allowing us to move easily through space alongside Johnson. Glenn Davidson’s lighting design was quite understated, allowing us that familiarity with Johnson that the piece requires.  Overall, Trudeau Stories was a delightful theatrical experience and one that all Montreal’s should see if only for the sake that it all takes place in Montreal and it teaches us to believe in the unexpected.

I would like to congratulate Centaur Theatre and Roy Surette on a season of mesmerizing theatre. As an audience we travelled from Naples to Chile, from Florida to Toronto, and finally from rural Quebec back home to Montreal. It’s been quite a ride! I look forward to following the promising 2010-2011 season. >>

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Trudeau Stories

Jeanette Kelly - Homerun

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Trudeau Stories

May 11, 2010 - Marianne Ackerman
Bringing PET To Life

The enigma of Pierre Elliott Trudeau is a bug Canadians will never fully get out of our system. His presence redefined a somewhat dowdy country in the eyes of the world, leaving us with a collective anxiety about whether we quite measured up. Brooke Johnson has captured this strange ambivalence in a beautiful one-woman show about her friendship with the just-retired PM begun when she was 23.

While attending the National Theatre School in the mid-eighties, Johnson, as student rep on the Board of Directors, was summoned to take part in the institution’s 25th anniversary celebrations. Wearing a borrowed dress and shoes two sizes too big, she was an awkward ingénue. Trudeau caught her eye in the crowd, insisted on a dance and slipped her his phone number. What followed was a platonic liaison built on lunches, dinners, long walks and late-night cognac at his art deco mansion on Pine Avenue.

Two decades later, she resurrected old diaries and their letters, turning the experience into a monologue. First performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2007, the story has evolved into an evocative piece of memoir theatre, enjoying a successful run at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, which incidentally, premiered Linda Griffith’s memorable Maggie and Pierre in 1980.

Inevitably, there’s an element of voyeurism in the act of going public with a private experience like this one. The cringe factor looms large. In the first 10 minutes, the actor/writer reduces the risk considerably by establishing an engaging version of her younger self, conveying the terror of being spotted and courted by the great man so convincingly that you can’t help sympathising.

Stranded in the middle of a ballroom dance floor, forced to confess she can’t dance because the toilet paper in the toes of her ill-fitting shoes won’t permit it, she’s a stand-in for the whole star-struck country, simultaneously awkward and dazzled, struggling to rise to the challenge of amusing the great man.
Johnson’s ability to recreate the spirit of Trudeau in the telling of her story is quite amazing. With a minimum of effort, she conveys his voice, his shrug, the oozing confidence rendered human by the faintest whiff of vulnerability. The cathedral bells tolling for his funeral sent a collective shiver through the audience. Afterwards, the lawyer representing Trudeau’s old firm Heenan Blaikie (inevitably, the production sponsor) was visibly moved when called upon to say a few words to the reception crowd, added proof that, while offering no great revelation or fresh insight into the only PM in living memory with royal jelly, Trudeau Stories succeeds in the way that all theatre yearns to succeed, by bringing a character to life onstage, his joie de vivre, his passion for life, and his angst.

Most movingly of all, we get a strong sense of the man’s profound loneliness as he reaches out to a youthful spirit across a crowded room. At 70 minutes, an engaging encounter with two memorable personalities, not to be missed.

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Trudeau Stories

May 7, 2010 - Pat Donnelly
Review: Trudeau Stories

“He haunts us still.”

These oft-borrowed words from the biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Stephen Clarkson and Christina Newman, continue to resonate.

Love him or hate him (and some do both), Trudeau was a charismatic figure, an inspirational force to be reckoned with and, even in his declining years, an unapologetic flirt who loved to dance with pretty young debutantes at balls.

It was this side of the former prime minister that acting student Brooke Johnson encountered at a National Theatre School gala in 1985. The fact that her oversized, borrowed shoes were stuffed with toilet paper added a comic aspect to their conversation. He asked her to lunch. She opted for a walk in Old Montreal. And thus a May/December friendship was forged between a 66-year-old senior citizen and a young woman of 23.

Johnson, now 48, has curated her memories into a pleasantly diverting one-woman show called Trudeau Stories, now playing at Centaur Theatre.

With refreshing candour and insouciant charm, she takes us through her process of recollection (reading from old journals and letters) and dishes on her private “dates” with the former PM, which took place over a year and half in Montreal. After that, they kept in touch through letters and phone calls. (Johnson has said elsewhere that she last saw Trudeau in person when he came to see her in Karla and Griff at Centaur Theatre in 1992.)

In a way, the ephemeral nature of their connection makes Johnson’s tribute all the more daring because she could have ended up looking ridiculous, pathetic or exploitative.

But she deftly avoids these pitfalls by poking fun at the groupie side of her younger self, sharing no more than she needs to, blurring her voice to skip over too-intimate passages in their letters. (Apparently she kept copies of hers as well as his, and a couple of answering machine messages, as well. But what young girl wouldn’t?)

Johnson, her hair cut boyishly short, clad in cardigan, blue jeans and work socks, skips back and forth in time, as if in the throes of her memories, taking on characters to set scenes as she goes.

Her approach is sensitive, respectful – and witty, especially when she takes on Trudeau’s voice and demeanour to convey a playful exchange between them.

In describing her first nocturnal visit to his Pine Ave. home, she appeals to our inner voyeurs by noting the details of the art deco interior and the three cereal bowls set out in the kitchen for his sons.

Although Johnson realizes now that she was a peripheral character in a worldly bachelor’s compartmentalized life, in the play she reveals her twentysomething naïveté – which he must have found disarming.

She read Yeats to Trudeau. They discussed Chekhov and argued the mechanics of poetry in their letters. Poignantly, he confessed to her that he was not as well read as some people thought, having spent far too much of his life poring over legal documents and government briefs.

Trudeau Stories may lack the punch and topicality of Linda Griffith’s 1980 solo Maggie and Pierre, in which she incarnated both Trudeaus, shortly after their stormy separation.

But, every once in a while, Johnson strikes a lovely, universal chord: “You have given me such exquisite memories and unique hope,” she reads from her last letter, sent shortly before his death. “You are a part of my imagination, a spark in my mind’s eye, a spur to my confidence.” Anyone who hears a trace of their own sentiments in these lines must see the play.

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Trudeau Stories

May 6, 2010 - Pat Donnelly
She could make Trudeau laugh

When Gemini award-winning actor Brooke Johnson was a second-year student at the National Theatre School in Montreal, she was obliged to attend a fundraising gala for the school as a representative of the English section.

It was a stressful occasion: "I didn't have any fancy clothes whatsoever," she recalled. "I had to borrow a dress and shoes."

Unfortunately, the shoes were too large: Size 9 on her Size 61/2 feet. Stuffed with toilet paper, they almost fit.

As a result, Johnson was apprehensive as well as thrilled when a distinguished guest in his mid-60s named Pierre Elliott Trudeau asked her to dance. It was November 1, 1985, more than a year after he had stepped down as prime minister of Canada.

At the time, Trudeau was a single-parent senior citizen, recently turned 66. Johnson was 23. Her confession of her shoe problem served to break the ice.

Thus began a unique relationship that endured for many years.

Now Johnson is 48, co-owns a Grand Banks trawler-style yacht with partner (and actor) Adrian Nuss, and is the star of her own one-woman show, Trudeau Stories, which opens tonight at Centaur Theatre.

It's a memory piece about time spent with Trudeau.

Why did she write it?

"I didn't write this as a play, originally," she said, speaking from Toronto. "I just wrote it to get my story, the history, out of my head. It was just a way of dealing with the grief of the loss. I started writing about a year after Trudeau died. I was going through old papers and boxes, stuff from my school days. I found all these journals that I'd forgotten about where I jotted down notes, extensive notes sometimes, about our lunches and stuff like that. I had all these memories floating back to me. Once I started writing, then I wanted to polish it and work on it. That was the fun part of the writing - the editing, going back over and over it."

Trudeau Stories, which premiered at Toronto's Summer Works Theatre Festival in 2007, is not an exhaustive tell-all. "I have cut back," she said. Before mounting it again in 2008, at Theatre Passe Muraille, Johnson added another story to the script, then dropped it.

"I think that right now, the circle of the story fits really well," she said. "It's balanced and it fits."

Johnson began acting in high school and, as a teenager, landed a job as a gofer at the Shaw Festival. This led to backstage gigs at Ontario's Red Barn Theatre, the Irish Arts Centre in Manhattan and the 1982 Dublin International Theatre Festival.

Before signing up for NTS, she had already worked for a family circus (in the tent crew) in Italy and a law firm in Toronto. By the time she met Trudeau, "I was kind of prepared in a way," she said.

Although they "hit it off" immediately, she didn't want to become a "conquest," she said. "I kept rejecting his advances. He asked me for lunch, he asked me for dinner. I just said I was too busy."

Also, as she later explained to him in a letter, after they had done lunch, she was already dating someone else. (This person, a former NTS teacher, is not named in the play.)

Trudeau said he wasn't looking for a romantic relationship either. And so their flirtatious friendship continued, under the radar of the media, which preferred to focus on Trudeau's dates with celebrities like Margot Kidder rather than ask why he was attending Noises Off or Karla and Griff (Johnson was in both) at Centaur Theatre.

The connection drifted off long before Trudeau's death on Sept. 28, 2000. Johnson built her career in theatre and film (notably as Sarah Polley's mom in The Sweet Hereafter) and shared a 19-year relationship with actor David Fox. Still, she was profoundly moved by the loss and came to Montreal for Trudeau's funeral, then decided not to go in: "Because it just didn't feel right."

And if P.E.T. were here now? "I always tried to make him laugh," she said. "I have a feeling that if he saw the play, he'd probably laugh."

Johnson plans to continue playwriting. "I'd like to write something that's a two-hander, for Adrian and I, so that when we sail down the Mississippi we can stop in little towns and put on our show."

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Trudeau Stories

May 6, 2010 - Steve Howell
Trudeau remembered in play at Centaur

Ever dance with a prime minister?

Brooke Johnson did.

The Centaur Theatre presents "Trudeau Stories," written and performed by the Canadian playwright and actress.

The tale begins in 1985 when Toronto native Johnson was a second-year student at National Theatre School in Montreal. It was Pierre Elliot Trudeau's first year out of office after serving a 16-year stint as Canada's prime minister, and he had returned from Ottawa to live in his native Montreal with his young son.

As a student at the Theatre School, Johnson had been elected to serve as student representative on the school board.

"I got to go to a fancy gala to celebrate the school's 25th anniversary," Johnson said. "This was a black-tie fancy thing."

A self-proclaimed "awkward young woman" at the time, Johnson admits she didn't have the appropriate attire to wear for such an event, so she borrowed a dress from a friend.

"The dress fit great," Johnson said.

The shoes? Not so much. The black pumps Johnson borrowed were two sizes too big.

"So I stuffed toilet tissue in the toe," she said. "I had to confess that to (Trudeau) because he wanted to dance. It's a pretty funny, awkward, doofy way that we met."

Fashion faux pas aside, Trudeau didn't mind a bit.

"I think that sort of set the tone," Johnson said. "I think he thought it was rather charming."

AGE AND YOUTH

The gala tale is one of many stories Johnson recalls in the play. After that first dance, the pair met a few more times as friends. Johnson felt it necessary to address the fact that she wasn't interested in any kind of romantic relationship.

"I wasn't looking for any romance and he responded in kind, so we were friends," Johnson said. "It's one of the things that makes the play interesting. There's a neat boundary that's crossed of a young woman and an older male."

At the time, Johnson was 23 and Trudeau was 65.

"I think the youth and age thing was really important to him and part of the reason why he liked me," Johnson said. "I had that great curiosity of youth, I wanted to be an artist, and he appreciated that. Those sensibilities are certainly what made him a great prime minister."

Most of the "Trudeau Stories" tales take place in the year and a half following the initial meeting. After Johnson graduated in 1987, she returned to Toronto to pursue her acting career, but the relationship between the student and the former prime minister continued through letters and phone calls. Johnson returned to Montreal in 1992, where she once again got a chance to meet with Trudeau in a most appropriate setting — he attended the Centaur Theatre to see Johnson perform in the play "Karla and Griff." It would be the last time the two would meet.

"I want to say the friendship lasted until he died, but that's not really true," Johnson said. "I got caught up with my life in Toronto."

A DIFFERENT GRIEF

The playwright also notes the death of Trudeau's son Michel, who died in an avalanche in 1998.

"(Trudeau) aged from that," she said.

When the former prime minister died at the age of 80 in 2000, Johnson says, she was "completely thrown off balance."

"I didn't know how sick he was," she said. "And I didn't know what to do with my grief because that friendship I had with him wasn't a known thing. It was just mine. I couldn't say, 'Oh, my friend died.' I mean, the whole country was mourning. My grief was different."

Johnson then nostalgically perused long-forgotten student journals and started to write about her friendship with Trudeau.

"I thought, 'Wow, this has many layers.' I should share this somehow."

With a little encouragement from friends, a play was born.

Johnson initially wrote the piece for the 2007 Toronto Fringe Festival. With a successful run there, she then transformed the work into a full theatrical piece. It has since been performed in numerous productions. Johnson never imagined the play would take off like it did.

"But I didn't want people to think I was self-aggrandizing or opportunistic. That was my biggest fear," she said. "As a piece of theater, I wanted it to speak on many levels and have resonance. I didn't want it to be a gossip piece."

Johnson took comfort in the positive audience reaction.

"People that see the show are so affected by the insight into (Trudeau) and the humanity of him," she said. "I hope it gives people the sense that they should and can approach people who are leaders. Our thoughts are as important and as vital as theirs. We shouldn't put them on a pedestal."

Johnson says a broader scope about art, culture and humanity helps you make the right decision.

"And one of the great things about Trudeau is that he enjoyed and understood all of that."