To launch its season, Espace GO offers a dramatic closed session by American author Debbie Tucker Green, at the center of which is a black woman who is the victim of an attack. A text full of unsaid words and innuendoes which, it seems to us, misses its target.
We don’t know exactly where we are, but the place is clean. Four chairs. A water dispenser with small plastic cups. Basta.
On stage, three characters bring rope to life. stiff: a black woman (Stephie Mazunya) – we don’t know what her character is doing there at the start – and two clumsy employees, probably civil servants (Patrice Dubois and Ève Landry), who try, as best they can, to put her comfortable.
Little by little, we understand that this woman was the victim of an attack. An aggression that she seems to link to the color of her skin. As a result, despite the two employees’ attempts at comfort, she rejects the hand they extend to her. “You can’t understand me. You can’t even begin to understand…”
What’s annoying is that we don’t know anything about the event – and we won’t know anything about it either. The viewer must blindly accept this anemic version of the story. We understand that the character has lost confidence in the system, but isn’t it perilous to reject the goodwill of others? To associate his aggression with a form of systemic racism?
The artistic director, Ginette Noiseux, even writes in her program: “The author probes the excesses of systems of white supremacy and sweeps away the smokescreens about racism that white people do not see. » Sorry, but if we want to make this a matter of racism, we have to give more to the viewer. In this case, you need to have a fertile imagination to guess all these intentions.
Stephie Mazunya’s game lacks nuance. Her character is angry, yes, but at no point do we feel vulnerable. Even when she talks about the impact of “the event” on her family, we don’t feel much… Mind you, maybe if the author had given us some details about the affair, we could have been affected.
We finally understand that she is there to choose the punishment she will inflict on her attacker: injection, gas chamber, decapitation, hanging… The crux of this dystopian fiction seems to be there. Will she have the strength to condemn him? Isn’t this a return to the law of retaliation?
This question would have deserved a few additional dialogues and seemed quite promising… However, it does not seem to be an issue for the character. Except perhaps for this letter written by the anonymous executioner… The only element that creates a certain suspense in the play.
As for the two accompanying employees, Patrice Dubois and Ève Landry defend rather well these two blundering characters who want to do well, but get entangled. Are they unconsciously participating in a racist system? A hierarchy or a cultural inequality? Maybe so, but the author absolutely does not prove it.
Rope service comics. stiff, the two guards punctuate their dialogues by playing tap dancing when they move (which amplifies their clumsiness), a good flash from director Alexia Bürger, who succeeds in creating interesting spaces for dialogue. It’s a shame, however, that these dialogues absolutely do not enrich the discussion on attacks, systemic racism or even justice.
