Back on Pointe

A sense of community: Paquette (Michel Perron) and Johnny (Kent Allen) in David Fennario's Condoville. Courtesy Centaur Theatre.

A sense of déjà vu hangs over the main stage at the Centaur Theatre, in the bosom of Old Montreal’s former financial district. Here, a mock version of one of the city’s balconied apartment backsides faces an audience six nights a week. It’s the set for Condoville — the fresh, appealing and unexpected hit of Montreal’s theatre season — and it makes the Centaur’s stage look much the same as it did 26 years ago, when the theatre hosted Condoville’s prequel, playwright David Fennario’s landmark drama Balconville.

In 1979, language tension reigned in Montreal, with a fiercely separatist government ruling Quebec for the first time. The province crouched on the verge of its first harrowing referendum. Fennario ran the tension between the city’s English- and French-speaking working classes through much of Balconville. He had the audacity to have the two groups collide in the same blue-collar milieu, neatly shattering the myth that all Montreal Anglos were upper-crust factory owners living in Westmount.

For some observers, news of Fennario’s planned sequel to his warts-and-all depiction of Montreal’s two solitudes raised fears that he was returning to Balconville’s Pointe St-Charles neighbourhood — or “the Pointe,” as it’s called in both plays — out of late-career desperation. But Condoville has proven itself a critical success and, like the original, has been held over at the Centaur because of solid audience numbers.

Balconville played across North America, had a successful run in London, England, and was translated into a masterful TV adaptation in 1984. For years afterward, interviewers asked Fennario why he wasn’t doing anything new at the Centaur. He responded that he simply hadn’t been asked. That changed early this year, when the Centaur’s artistic director, Gordon McCall, approached Fennario with a suggestion for the theatre’s 2005-06 season of Montreal stories: Would Fennario consider returning to Balconville’s balconies? He would.

“He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Fennario says of his conversation with McCall. “He offered me a commission, I told him I’d take a stab at it.... I fumbled around with it for months, trying to find a reason for these people to come back. Then I found it.”

What Fennario discovered was a new tension to rule the Pointe. Now that Montreal’s language anxiety is largely dormant and the city’s economy has risen from the dead, he knew things had to shift. “What the people here are facing is losing their homes because of gentrification. What they managed to win 25 years ago they are now losing because they are not managing to cooperate, despite living in a co-op,” he says.

Filipe (Quincy Armorer) and Andrew (Neil Napier) bring change to the neighborhood. Courtesy Centaur Theatre.

Oddly enough, Fennario says he did not reference his original play before beginning work on the new one, but rather just sat down and revisited the characters from memory. He didn’t happen across his old work until Condoville’s rehearsal process, when its actors sat down for a reading of Balconville. “I hadn’t read it in 15 years,” Fennario says. “It holds up pretty good.”

Condoville is no mere rehash, but rather the playwright’s new set of ideas wrapped around the same grubby city block and inhabitants who populated the first play. Two original Balconville cast members, Yolande Circe and Jean Archambault, have returned to reprise their roles; their dialogue remains crisp, capturing the friction that arises between neighbours of different stripes as they work to survive in an increasingly affluent and upwardly mobile city. One Balconville character has died, some have slipped away unnoticed, and a gay, mixed-race couple have moved in, playing the conspicuous gentrifiers who have thrown off the neighbourhood’s balance.

Fennario has experienced his share of rough times in the quarter century since Balconville became a Canadian theatre classic. He remains the agit-prop activist he was then, railing against what he sees as a conservative agenda running rampant in both international affairs and on the domestic front. “There was a rightward shift in the middle class throughout the ’80s,” he says. “Neoliberalism, for better or worse, was seen as the only way forward. To be in opposition to that meant that you didn’t make much sense. But I feel like I’m making sense again. People can see that we’re in a social crisis right now and that something has to be done.”

The playwright has also faced some serious health issues. Three years ago he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nerve disorder that can lead to brain and spinal cord damage. Fennario spent some time in a wheelchair and now uses a walker. The Centaur held a fundraiser for him in 2002 to support him in his hour of need.

And Fennario’s stance on Centaur audiences appears to have softened. Back in the Balconville days, he had no qualms knocking the well-heeled patrons of Montreal’s Anglo institutions. “I follow what Thomson Highway has done. He manages to make things that aren’t funny into funny things. That way you reach a wide range of people you wouldn’t otherwise connect with. The majority of that audience wouldn’t agree with me politically. Some of them might even violently disagree, but you give them a sense of what’s going on, and of what the stakes are, and I feel you might be able to reach those people on a different level.”

Fennario has been pleasantly surprised to find that Centaur audiences are once again embracing his work, though he is quick to add that he feels he reaches beyond the theatre’s predominantly blue-rinse subscriber base. “I think my audiences have always been a bit more varied. In the discussion I had with Gord McCall, I said that I felt this was not going to have the impact that Balconville did. Not because it will be inferior, but because it just won’t be as topical. Balconville was right at the edge of the French-English thing, and that really hadn’t been explored before, at least not from an insider’s perspective.”

But Condoville has turned out to be more controversial than Fennario expected, igniting a new round of public dialogue about the massive change in cost of living in Montreal, a city formerly renowned for its high apartment vacancy rate. The Gazette, Montreal’s conservative, sole English-language daily, responded to Condoville in an October editorial, arguing that gentrification has been good for the city and that its poor have not been displaced because the new buildings have gone up on what had been vacant lots. “It’s the first time in my career that my critique was critiqued on the editorial page,” Fennario says. “But it prompted the question: What was on those lots before they became vacant?”

Another question arises: How will Fennario celebrate his latest hit being held over at the Centaur? “I’m going to get a walker with bigger wheels,” he says. “And then I’m going to get some Johnny Walker to drink with my friends. And I’ll also pay my rent for a while.”

Condoville runs at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre until Nov. 6.

Matthew Hays is a Montreal writer.