La Liste) a Study Guide

in co-production with presents The List (La Liste) a study guide PRODUCTION SPONSOR RESOURCE and BACKGROUND MATERIAL: Written and compiled by Jim McNabb of the Great Canadian Theatre Company Adapted by Nightwood Theatre, September 2010 For further information on this study guide please contact Rebecca Peirson email: [email protected] phone: 416-944-1740 x8 www.nightwoodtheatre.net This document may be used for educational purposes only. This play is suitable for students ages 14 and up. CONTENTS The Play Introduction 3 Director’s Notes 4 What others are saying 5 Theme of Loneliness and Isolation 6-8 Production & Creative Cast and Creative Team 9 Denyse Karn on Set Design 10 Nightwood Theatre 11 Canadian Stage 11 Kelly Thornton (Director) 12 Allegra Fulton (Actor) 12 Jennifer Tremblay (Playwright) 13-14 Shelly Tepperman (Translator) 15-16 Exploratory Excerpt from La Liste (French) 17-18 Excerpt from The List (English) 19-20 The Art of Translation 21-23 Governor General’s Award 24 Other Resources 25 Suggested Activities Pre-performance activities 27-28 Post-performance activities 29 Curriculum References 30-31 Credits Great Canadian Theatre Company 32 2 INTRODUCTION “Wailing, tears, reproaches are pointless. So we seek consolation in that oblivion we call memory. ” This is a quotation playwright Jennifer Tremblay uses on the first page of the script. It comes from the novel The Quest for Christa T. by German writer Christa Wolf, a work that is concerned with a woman experiencing overwhelming societal pressure to conform. Jennifer Tremblay set out to reproduce for an audience of readers or listeners an emotion that she herself had once experienced. After many attempts the result was a work that she described initially as a narrative by a woman relating an event. It took the form of succinct phrases one might use in a list of tasks or a series of Blackberry messages. The published narrative titled La Liste won the Governor General’s Award for French Drama in 2008—before it had ever been performed as a play. La Liste received its first French production in January, 2010 at Montreal’s Théatre d’Aujourd’hui where it won high praise as a one-woman show. SETTING The kitchen of a modern house in rural Quebec CHARACTER Woman PLOT A woman speaks directly to the audience sharing with them her remorse over an event. She tells of her loneliness in the rural community and her isolation as a mother caring for her children. She confides of her obsession of making lists to remind her of her many daily duties. She tells of Caroline, another mother of young children who sought her friendship and subsequently asked a favour of her. The woman neglected that item on her list, the result being a terrible consequence. She asks us if she is responsible for the tragedy. THEMES A number of themes will resonate with an audience for The List. Watch for examination of themes of loneliness, physical and emotional isolation, remorse, feminine empowerment, the clash of urban and rural cultures, contrasts of old and new Québeçois cultures and traditions, the lack of support systems for mothers in rural areas, the isolation of home-bound mothers, dealing with death, depersonalization and non-communication in the modern world. 3 DIRECTOR’S NOTES The List is a rare play, unlike any other I’ve ever dealt with. Jennifer Tremblay’s syncopated text possesses a list-like quality in the telling of the tale, so spare that upon first read it feels almost illusive. But the words, the imagery, the razor sharp analysis it presents of our modern life, haunts me and continues to resonate with me on a very deep personal level. The scenario it describes: a woman misjudging the importance of a favour asked, reveals avoidance, procrastination, congestion and an overwhelmed life that allows us to belittle the needs of others, to disconnect from our humanity and to isolate ourselves until we are completely set adrift from one another. Tremblay has taken this to the point of crisis to demonstrate the point but the power lies in its metaphor for the modern life: the epidemic proportions of our failing compassion for one another. The List won the French language Governor General’s Award in 2008 and in translation by Shelley Tepperman it has remained intact in terms of its cultural aesthetic. Less concerned with the dominating realism of English language theatre Tremblay describes the work as theatre of the unconscious and this allows us, even in translation, to approach the work from a place where symbolism and surrealism conduct the theatrical expression. In our stage conceptualization we have run the gamut of virtually nothing on the stage but the woman and the tree in the field, to a fully realized kitchen from which we spy into her world as voyeurs. This tangible environment is where we finally arrived, where the benign appearance of the kitchen, the normalcy it represents can become unhinged in the unconscious; objects turn on their heads as in a dream. The play deals with memory – she travels into her memory to seek answers for the culpability of her friend’s tragic end but in memory our minds play tricks, our minds serve up images sometimes floating to the fore as clues and it is here that we will begin our approach towards performance of the text. Indeed its exciting stuff. And the emotional depth of my actor Allegra Fulton, the repression and terror reverberating in one pause, lets me know we’re in for an amazing theatrical journey in the next month. I can’t wait to reveal it to the audience to see how the work resonates for them as they sit in the theatre quietly combing through their own crowded agendas in their minds... - Kelly Thornton, Director of The List 4 WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING Alexandre Vignault interviews Jennifer Tremblay for cyberpresse.ca, Jan. 9, 2010. Jennifer Tremblay does not beat around the bush: in her play La Liste she wanted to not just touch the members of the audience but to overwhelm them. After much searching she feels that the most effective way in achieving this goal was to resort to using short, dry and direct sentences, a style inspired by email. She felt that to highlight the tragedy she had to remove all the frills and go with the basics. La Liste takes the form of a monologue relating the relationship of two women, the narrator on stage and Caroline, a woman already dead. They are two distant neighbours, because they live in the country, and two mothers as different as mothers can be. Caroline lives in a mess with a flock of children. The narrator seems to be compulsively orderly and spends her time writing lists of things to do. This obsession with lists betrays a desire for perfection in the narrator, Tremblay believes. “It’s a disease of the century, the era of Martha Stewart; but it’s also a way for her to survive. This is a person who likes order. Children are full of life, the opposite of order and organization. She is just trying not to lose control of her life. It is her way of being a good mother.” Being a mother in the twenty-first century is not a sinecure. The narrator suffers from loneliness, regrets that it is so difficult to see friends and has no one to lean on or talk to. “A mother who stays at home in 2010 is extremely isolated. The community of women no longer exists,” says the playwright. “People are always swamped. The terrible end of Caroline is not uncommon in today’s hectic lifestyle. A little oversight which becomes a tragedy.” Canada Council Jury’s comment on selection of Jennifer Tremblay’s La Liste : “Absolutely inspired. The author proposes a simple, syncopated tale of everyday to-do lists in which the essential and the ordinary are inextricably entwined. Jennifer Tremblay achieves the universal with economy and lucidity.” Le Bagnole Publisher’s description of the script: La Liste is nothing less than a new kind of drama. A piece that is at the crossroads of romantic soliloquy, a theatrical monologue combining a diary and a grocery list. A theatre that would stage the world. A theatre of life. Where boards are those of the kitchen floor. And where the greatest tragedies are born of the most mundane moments of everyday life. Claudia Larochelle writing in Rue Frontenac , an online journal, Jan. 18, 2010. “Once in a while, you feel the dagger brush against the area of your heart where your own guilt is lying, teasing you, haunting. Ouch. Few are those who don’t have a sin, an omission or a fraud on the conscience. La Liste frees us a bit.” 5 THEME of LONELINESS AND ISOLATION Jennifer Tremblay revealed in an interview for this Study Guide that the play’s central emotion of loneliness and solitude arose from a personal experience. Some years ago she chose to move to the country with her three children, but when she got there the isolation troubled her greatly. Surrounded by strangers and without the support system of family and friends she felt overcome by loneliness. In his book The Unheard Cry for Meaning , Viktor Frankl wrote “We live in a society in which isolation is commonplace. In the impersonal climate of industrial society, even more people obviously suffer from a sense of loneliness—the loneliness of the lonely crowd. Understandably, the intense wish emerges to compensate for this lack of warmth with closeness. People cry for intimacy.” Although Frankl wrote this over three decades ago, the idea is even more relevant today.

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