Elephant Wake a touching memoir

Elephant Wake, Catalyst Theatre’s latest tour de force, is if anything, an emotionally charged production.

Created, written and performed by Joey Tremblay, one time co-artistic director working alongside St. Albert’s Jonathan Christenson, this one-man show chronicles the passing of a family, a community and a traditional culture as seen through the eyes of village’s lone inhabitant.

Jean-Claude is a 77-year-old innocent, a slightly disabled man with an unnamed mental disorder, who provides a bridge between the francophone and English-speaking world.

Directed by Bretta Gerecke, this 90-minute play is coming-of-age story inspired by Tremblay’s own experiences growing up in Saskatchewan.

Set in the fictional village of St. Vierge located on the Saskatchewan prairie, Jean-Claude acts as the historian-narrator and creates a saga peopled by three generations.

Tremblay’s natural stream-of-consciousness storytelling takes us into a world where he is an only child with dozens of relatives on each side. Jean-Claude is the only child of a single French mother and an unknown English father. After his mother dies during childbirth, his francophone grandparents raise him despite resentment from extended family.

He tells a touching tidbit of how he was nicknamed Choux-gras (The Weed).

“Nobody wants you in the garden. They always pull you out. But when they see you in they ditch, they say, ‘Voyons, c’est beau.’”

When we meet Jean-Claude, he lives alone except for past memories of a family that he holds tightly and with great affection. As the play unfolds, we also encounter those who abused and deliberately humiliated him for their own callous pleasure.

In re-enacting his life, Tremblay plays more than a dozen characters (I stopped counting at 10) from a prissy English lady, a hyper priest and a gay cabaret-singing uncle to a Métis buddy, a bullying teacher and his gentle grandparents.

We accompany Jean-Claude from childhood into manhood. In flashbacks that jump back and forth, he recounts with graphic accuracy the building of a highway that gradually increased the use of cars to the nearby English town of Welby and gradually depleted St. Vierge.

The increased highway travel to Welby eventually closed the francophone school and Roman Catholic church in town. As development brought change, all the relatives joined the flow of traffic and left. Jean-Claude was the lone sentinel to remain in the village of his birth.

The play is at once humorous and irreverent, poignant and bittersweet. Most touching of all is the anguish he feels after his grandparents die.

But he survives following the simple advice of his grandparents – never forget to speak French, say your prayers, and stay strong and busy.

Throughout the show, we are completely charmed as Tremblay speaks a blend of English and French with a dash of the Latin mass thrown in. In his off-key voice, Jean-Claude sings of joy and sorrow, he dances, curses, laughs at himself and improvises directly with the audience.

Basically, Jean-Claude captivates us completely.

Tremblay has created a character that discovers life has passed him by. Yet in his earthbound wisdom, Jean-Claude refuses to pity himself. Instead, he attempts to create relevance for the remainder of his years, and that speaks volumes of an unwavering personal strength that progress cannot diminish.

Gerecke also does double duty as designer and has created a set full of objects that trigger Jean-Claude’s memory. Simply by arranging beer bottles and the rusted remnants of dairy farm – cream can, cream separator, water pump and a 1952 Ford truck – she invites the audience to reconsider the ordinary and see beauty in discarded objects.

Elephant Wake runs at C103 on Gateway Boulevard until Nov. 29. There is no intermission. Coarse language is used.