A public tragedy shatters a working class family in Montréal. Struggling to survive the aftermath, Benoît and Kathleen do everything they can to help their beloved son cope with guilt and rage...but Jean's young life becomes unglued. Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, the play intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working class family, escaped the massacre...or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism and despair explores the long private shadows that public violence casts.
Winner of the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama.
The December Man premiered in February 2007 at Alberta Theatre Projects as part of their Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays. It was directed by Bob White and starred Nancy Beatty, Brian Dooley and Rylan Wilkie.
Now available at Playwright's Canada Press.
From the Governor General's Literary Award for English Language Drama:
"The December Man (L'homme de décembre) is a tragedy in which the humanity of the characters gives the play a surprising buoyancy. Heartbreaking yet never sentimental, spare yet complex, with a flawless structure, this is a brave and important play."
Tight and traumatic story rings true on stage
By Cam Fuller, on November 19, 2012
Some plays and movies - the ones where children are in danger or hurt - make you want to go home and hug your kids.
The December Man makes you want to go home and hug everyone you love. Playwright Colleen Murphy uses the Montreal Massacre to show how trauma ripples through society, affecting even those who aren't directly involved.
It starts at the end with two harrowed parents, Benoit (Kent Allen) and Kathleen (Sharon Bakker). They are dressed in their Sunday best. But in the deafening silence of the first minute, it's clear that it's not a celebration they're going to.
The story moves backwards in time, a brilliantly successful device in this case. You see mistakes first and then the causes of them after. There's a constant marking of pages in your mind when you know you're getting a clue and then a measuring of the explanation to see if it's believable. And on every point, the thesis holds together. Absolutely everything rings true. The story runs 100 minutes without intermission. There isn't an extraneous comma in it.
It takes a while before we meet the couple's only son Jean (Aaron Hursh). He is shaken to the core by the school shooting where all the victims were women. Attending classes at the time, he was one of the males ordered to leave. By running away, he has condemned himself to a lifetime of what-ifs.
Director Brian Cochrane has a gift of a cast to work with - the right age, the right look, the right amount of experience. Allen, flawless at Friday's opening, had an authentic French lilt in his voice which seemed to make even the way he moved seem more real. Kathleen, we learn, had her first and only child later in life. Bakker takes this and draws a vivid picture of a mother who cares almost too much. Aside from too many opening-night word-tangles, she too was compelling. As tortured Jean, the amount of sympathy Hursh evoked was balanced by something else you don't expect - you're a bit afraid of him.
Being human, the parents make mistakes. They let their worst qualities dominate. They wallow; they lash out. Each thinks his or her suffering is the more acute. But in the play's best line, Benoit reluctantly agrees that they are equal - "a terrible kind of equal."
There's an endless black night of grief in this play but its triumph is that you don't mind. It's worth it because you come to understand why Murphy wrote it. She's challenging us to be better, to mend our own relationships, to do the right thing even when we don't feel like it - to love our loved ones, while we can.
Tragedy on the periphery
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By Robert Cushman, on April 15, 2008
Colleen Murphy's The December Man is a play prompted by the 1989 Montreal Massacre. It invents a story peripheral to the main event and tells it backwards. That may sound doubly, if not triply, perverse. In fact the choices turn out to be inspired and the execution, by both the author and her interpreters, virtually flawless. Micheline Chevrier's production, a collaboration between Canadian Stage and Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, was received on its Toronto first night with pin-drop concentration, a signal achievement for a play with no intermission and a minimal number of laughs.
It's grim but it isn't heavy. Much of it is familiar domestic drama raised to an unfamiliar level. We start with a middle-aged, working-class couple, Benoit and Kathleen, who seem to be preparing their home for a special occasion. John Ferguson's set is perfect, with just the right degree of respectable chintz, and with a quiet ceremonial air to it that turns out to be absolutely appropriate. We think for a moment that these are parents preparing a celebration of their son's graduation. It turns out that they are executing a suicide pact, and they want the place to look nice when they're found. It's one of the play's accomplishments that their concern, Kathleen's especially, for propriety comes to seem honourable rather than ridiculous. We learn that they did have a son, Jean, and that he has killed himself ahead of them.
Jean was one of the male engineering students present in the room at the Ecole Polytechnique that was invaded by Marc Lepine, and, like all the other men, he was ushered out of the room before the slaughter of the women began. His guilt never left him. It took various forms. He learned karate, so as to be more prepared were there ever a next time. He stopped going to classes by day and stayed out all night, haunting movie theatres. (He saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, twice.) The model building that was his course project, and whose specifics he had explained to his semi-comprehending but proud and fascinated father, didn't work out; he couldn't get it to balance properly. Finally, he hanged himself. I'm not giving any of this unfairly away here. The play's construction means that it is its own spoiler alert.
We're taken back, step by step, through the months that followed Jean's death and then through the months that preceded it. Just about everything rings true. Benoit and Kathleen squabble with one another and with their son like any family, especially one in which the parents have invested all their pride and all their hope in an only child who's almost bound to seem unresponsive. Most people get through stuff like this; these people are thrown into a situation in which they can't. Benoit works on an assembly line whose management has waited decades to install air conditioning; Kathleen was a cleaner, though she gave that up after losing Jean, thereby -- at least in her husband's estimation -- making her state of mind even worse. He, meanwhile, drinks and smokes. Kathleen, a devout Catholic, is sure she'll be reunited with Jean in heaven. Benoit is far less sure; there's a weird sense, coinciding with his undoubted weariness, that he is going through with their plan partly to oblige his wife. They bicker over many things, but they would never let one another down. Brian Dooley and Nicola Lipman superbly embody both the strengths and the stresses of the marital bond. He's a big, caring and impatient man with a load of justified resentments and the usual fears and inhibitions about communicating with his son. Where the father blusters, the mother nags; she's a worrier whose world collapses when she has no one to worry for. Mourning does not become her. Not every couple would end the story as they do, but we believe that this one would, ordinary though the partners seem. The play makes ineluctable tragedy out of the mundane, like prime Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman and His Wife, perhaps. In its end is its beginning, and it works both ways.
This means that the dramatic climax has to be the story's start. The author lays out for herself the task of dramatizing the terrible day as it would have appeared to these people -- the casual turning on of the TV, the frantic telephoning that would be comic in another context, the overwhelming but temporary relief--and she brings it off with total conviction. A rather similar challenge confronts the actor who plays Jean, who only comes onstage halfway through, after what I can only describe as one hell of a retrospective buildup. This, too, is brilliantly met, with Jeff Irving conveying the essence of a walking nightmare, shifting between blankness and hysteria. There is a hint that one of the murdered women was his girlfriend, or at least that he would have liked her to be. (The hint is dropped twice: the only instance of the play's overplaying its hand.) The actual details of the massacre are sparingly mentioned, but they're omnipresent; we catch glimpses of them in Kathleen's bitter acknowledgment of how many lives were wrecked, even her irrational jealousy of how some other victims were buried. Christmas is a recurring image in the play. There could be many other ways of dramatizing that one horrific December day, but it's hard to believe that there could be one more effective.
A deep and dark December
5 out of 5
By John Colbourne, on April 14, 2008
In a war zone, they'd be written off as collateral damage, one suspects -- innocent civilians who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up paying with lives. Except, there was no war being waged in Montreal the day Marc Lepine cut a murderous swath through L'Ecole Polytechnique that left 14 young women dead and another 13 students wounded. What's more, although their son Jean was there the day Lepine horrified the world, Benoit and Kathleen -- aging workhorses in a working class community -- were nowhere near the institution when the gunfire started.
Yet life changed forever for them and for their son on December 6, 1989.
Just how much it changed is spelled out in The December Man (L'homme de decembre), a new play from Colleen Murphy that had its Toronto premiere on the stage of the Berkeley Street Theatre last week in a co-production of the Canadian Stage Company and Edmonton's Citadel Theatre.
It is perhaps fitting that Murphy has chosen to tell her story of lives turned upside down by throwing her tale into reverse, beginning it with a tragic ending and ending it with the tragedy's beginning -- at the very moment happiness ended. That means we meet Benoit, played by Brian Dooley, and Kathleen, played by Nicola Lipman, at the end of their voyage, their lives completely undone by a tragedy that at first seemed to have only touched them peripherally. Broken-hearted, exhausted and in utter despair, they are brought into our lives as they prepare to take their own.
Initially, details of what brought them to this place are sparse, but what is evident is that each of them is all that the other has left -- and that simply isn't enough anymore. From there, Murphy takes us back in increments of time, with each stop along the way providing us an opportunity to scrape away more scar tissue and examine the exact nature of the wounds that have been slowly eating away their souls. It is a path that leads inexorably to the loss of their beloved only son, played by Jeff Irving. Born late in his mother's life, Jean was in many ways a perfect son: Friendly, respectful and so bright that he was the first in his family to enter university, in the process making his dream of a life as an engineer more real by the day.
It was that dream, of course, that put him in the classroom the day Lepine invaded. After that, it all turned into a nightmare as male was separated from female and genocide transformed to gender-cide. Like most of the males in school that day, Jean's life was spared -- but his conscience wasn't and neither he nor his parents will have the skills to cope with the inexorable weight of his guilt.
For the Toronto premiere of this Governor General's Award-winning drama, director Micheline Chevrier has assembled a dream cast, each and every one of them not only capable of, but fully prepared to, take the most miniscule elements of daily life and use them to create a compelling portrait of humanity. That the portraits thus created so heartbreakingly ordinary only adds to the power of this extraordinary work.
Indeed, Chevrier uses the ordinary throughout to maximum effect, focusing everything from John Ferguson's suburban set to the assembled minutiae of daily life so that it underlines the universal elements of the tragedy Murphy is rewinding in front of our very eyes. We are not only witness to Jean's descent into madness, but we watch as his parents' lives come apart as well -- as Kathleen frantically clutches at each new hope and Benoit quietly tries to drown his sorrow in alcohol.
And with them, we treasure the few brief moments at the end of their world, back when December 6, 1989, was just another day.
December Man deserves its flurry of applause.
Playwright Colleen Murphy turns tragedy into powerful, emotional theatre with her post-crisis account of a school shooting.
By Bryan Saunders, on March 10, 2008
The type of audience that frequents the Citadel's Rice Theatre tends to be a fairly critical and discerning crowd. Generally, it's made up of people who've seen a lot of theatre and who are hoping to see a fresh, exciting, and moving play.
It is noteworthy, then, that the opening night of the Citadel Theatre's run of The December Man ended with a standing ovation.
While this highest praise is sometimes given out like candy at other theatres, standing ovations at the Rice are few and far between, and only given to the most deserving productions.
This particular show is set entirely in the living room of a family home-and appropriately so, because The December Man explores how the lives of family are affected after a calamity of monumental proportions. In this case, the tragedy is the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre, but the issues that this play explores are far reaching.
Jean (Jeff Irving), one of the 50 men ordered out of a classroom before gunman Marc Lépine shot the nine women that remained, is also the only son of Kathleen (Nicola Lipman) and Benoit (Brian Dooley). He's the first one in his family to ever attend university and holds the family's future and hopes in his hands. But Jean's a wreck in the days following the shooting, battling with survivor's guilt in the wake of a massacre that claimed 14 innocent lives. He blames himself for not doing more to save the now-dead women, but mostly, Jean blames himself for not standing up to the gunman when he was ordered to leave the room.
Playing the role of Jean, Irving's acting is admittedly hit or miss at times. However, the occasional miss isn't a product of Irving not putting enough into his role, but just the opposite: playwright Colleen Murphy has already put so much emotion into the dialogue that whenever Irving tries to add to it, it seems over-the-top. When Irving does find the right amount of emotion required of him, his acting hits hard-often sending the audience into tears.
Like any good drama, The December Man isn't just a sob-fest, but has its share of laughs as well. Jean's exceedingly Catholic mother Kathleen provides much of the necessary comic relief. Furthermore, Lipman provides these laughs while expertly maintaining the honesty in her character. The many audience members who grew up with such a mother will be doubled over with laughter when they see her up on the stage.
There's also Dooley, playing the role of Jean's loving-but-alcoholic father, Benoit. As the hardworking, blue-collar Benoit, Dooley steals the show. The expert actor's years of theatre experience are obvious through the emotion behind every line he delivers, and the dynamic depth with which he portrays his character. Because of this, one can only hope that Dooley makes a return to the Edmonton theatre scene sometime very soon.
In addition to the attention-grabbing characters and the touchingly honest dialogue, playwright Colleen Murphy has laced her script with an abundance of symbolism. Set and costume designer John Ferguson and lighting designer Ereca Hassell pick up on this and do an excellent job of maintaining and adding to what Murphy has already created. With so much talent, it's hardly a surprise that the opening night of The December Man ended with the audience on its feet.
Guilt grips a great play that recalls Montreal massacre
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By author, on date
When Marc Lépine began his murderous rampage against women in a Montreal classroom in 1989, he first ordered all the men out of the room. The guilt of one of those guys who survived -- by not only walking away but running -- grows into a monstrous self-loathing in The December Man, Colleen Murphy's superb study of how the ripple effect of an awful event can destroy families far beyond the inner circle of victims.
Green Thumb Theatre is known as a company specializing in theatre for young audiences, but no adult of any age should miss the chance to see this heartbreaking work. Patrick McDonald proves his place as a veteran director by knowing exactly how to take a taut script and pace his performers in a measured building of tension that ends, ironically, with fervent prayers of thanks.
Ron Lea and Bridget O'Sullivan portray Benoit and Kathleen Fournier, a working-class couple whose son Jean (Charlie Gallant) cannot escape the nightmare (and now-nightly nightmares) of what happened when he fled. As the program notes, all eight scenes take place in the Fournier's living room, shifting backwards in time at each scene so we first face the full horror of what ultimately happened to the Fourniers before closing with Kathleen seen on her knees, thanking God for sparing her son on the day of the massacre.
By throwing things in reverse, Murphy can cleverly wrench her audience all over the emotional landscape. What we already know about the characters and their fates becomes all the more disturbing because the roots of their pain are laid bare, layer by layer.
Lea and O'Sullivan are perfectly attuned to the playwright's sharp sense of realism, both actors carving out genuine people who have all the little tics of a blue-collar Quebecois couple. Each serves an indifferent master, he in a machine shop and she cleaning houses for the rich, and as Jean swears in French and Kathleen crosses herself against such blasphemy, a deep sense of symbolism about French-Canadian culture underpins Murphy's straight ahead approach to this story-in-reverse.
Gallant also understands the simplicity of things. His portrait of Jean is all the more painful to watch because we quickly realize that we'll never know this sweet, quiet young man before he's destroyed by Lépine's rampage.
The set by Omanie Elias is as real as what unfolds on it, and blackouts between scenes are made moody by Corbie Fieldwalker's clever sound design -- why won't that phone stop ringing? Could it be bad news?
"The December Man is a sorrowful necessity and will become a defining response to 25-year-old Marc Lépine's killing of 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique."
