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Pleasure is the key word in Rosebud Theatre’s production of Michel Tremblay’s enduring 1998 classic, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, which is running until Oct. 26.
Our pleasure, as an audience, begins with Tremblay’s play itself, a tribute to his emotionally volatile mother, who he calls Nana. He places himself in the play as The Narrator. When Tremblay wrote Pleasure he had already established himself as one of Quebec’s leading dramatists, having written such groundbreaking tragicomedies as Les Belles-Soeurs, Hosanna and La Duchess de Langeais. He had also written several novels, short stories and screenplays. What he makes clear in Pleasure is he owes his dramatic flair to his mother, who encouraged his love of the arts, and practically badgered him into reading everything from classic novels to cheap melodramas. The tragedy in his life is that his mother never lived to see what her love helped create.
Pleasure is a loving tribute to his mother. Like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Pleasure is a memory play, so Tremblay is allowed to take license with facts, in this case the rants he recalls from the time he was 10 years old, until his 20s when she died. He wants, so desperately, to see her one more time, for comfort and possibly inspiration. He does this by summoning her ghost, and allowing the ghost the stage time she never got in real life.
Director Morris Ertman adds more pleasure through his staging. He sets the show on the Rosebud stage so that we can see all the theatrical rigging, and he opens it, as we file into the theatre, with the assistant stage manager, Matthew Boardman, polishing some of the lighting units they didn’t use for this production. There’s the facade of a house, and one comfortable swivel chair where The Narrator (Griffin Cork) will sit while Nana (Karen Johnson-Diamond) enters in a cloud of mist and helps him remember a series of discussions they had over 15 years.
Those memories range from his almost being arrested at age 10 for throwing ice under passing cars, or confessing he has never liked her rare roast beef, to mimicking neighbours and in-laws. Perhaps the most powerful is a moment when she comes down from bed to tell him how much she loves a certain actress. Tremblay would later write plays and films for that actress, entering a world Nana would have loved to be part of, even for a moment.
Ertman stages the show so that Nana is often behind that chair as she scolds her son. We see Johnson-Diamond and Cork’s simultaneous reactions to each other, and they are so powerful and beautiful, it is difficult to know where to focus, but always we see the love they have for each that they don’t necessarily show when they do look at one other.
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is always an emotional roller coaster for an audience, and the one at Rosebud is made all the more intense and rewarding because Cork is Johnson-Diamond’s real life son. We’re seeing the bond Tremblay recalls, mirrored through this mother and son bringing his words to life, and it is truly magical. This is quite possibly Johnson-Diamond and Cork’s finest work in their already established stellar careers. There are times when you wonder if the expressions on Cork’s face are The Narrator’s, or his own for this magnificent, overpowering, over melodramatic woman behind him, his own mother.
The pleasure in Rosebud Theatre’s production of For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is all ours, so don’t miss this little gem out at Rosebud. Mothers take your sons. Sons treat your mothers.