The December Man

December is a bleak time of year. It is cold and white and dark, yet the entire month revolves around this sense of holiday cheer. It's kind of paradoxical, but perhaps it's no accident we choose to set our most profound celebration within our most dismal season.

The December Man is a bleak play. It is a gripping and soul-rending exploration into the nature of hopelessness. Yet, paradoxically, it is also about hope, about that persistent little flicker that soldiers on in the face of insurmountable odds.

Live Five's second show of the season tackles the nebulous distinction between life and living. The plot centres on the events of the "Montreal Massacre" — a shooting spree at the Ecole Polytechnique in December 1989, where Marc Lépine killed 14 women before shooting himself. Our principal characters are an elderly Franco-Irish couple consumed with grief after the suicide of their son, an engineering student racked with survivor's guilt in the years following the massacre. The play is told in reverse-chronological order; each scene takes place several months before the previous one. This technique adds tremendous strength to the narrative structure, because instead of simply seeing their family deteriorate, we see a more tragic picture that layers on dramatic irony while peeling back the layers of history in a constant search for meaning, just as we all do when confronted by tragedy.

There was an intimate house at the showing I attended, and the ushers encouraged us to sit as close to the front as we were comfortable. I ordinarily stay away from the front row, but in this case I decided to take the plunge. Anyone else going to see the show, I encourage them to do the same. This is a play best experienced at arm's length. It is built on tiny moments, and it is unwise to miss a single one of them. These moments start from the very beginning, when we see Kent Allen shamble onstage as the father, Benoit, his face stained in a look of anguish that tells us all we need to know. Their dress is formal, but it is clearly funereal rather than celebratory.

The cast takes on a tremendous amount of stress in order for the emotional reality of the play to land. Aaron Hursh plays Jean, the tragic son, whom we spend three scenes waiting for before he returns from the dead, as it were. At that point we begin to understand the legacy of the play: the sense of haunting torment his parents have been carrying around with them after his death now passes back to him. Hursh plays understated, almost muffled, with a few intense emotional spikes, such as when we see him having night terrors. When we first see him he is dazed and disjointed, not entirely registering the world around him; and as he moves back in time we see an increasing effort to piece his mind back together, while we know that it will never quite happen.

Kent Allen plays a very precarious game, teetering on the edge of emotional collapse without toppling over. He takes on the role of the father, exhausted and defeated, having come from nothing and desiring only to provide a life for his family. Seeing that he has failed to secure that very basic thing, he takes the responsibility for Jean's death on himself. Allen performs this role with grace gravity (not to mention a very natural Quebecois accent), but is not afraid to inject small moments of humour.

The heart of the play, however, is Sharon Bakker, as the mother Kathleen, who is onstage for all but about five minutes of the production. Incidentally, I've already seen Bakker play a grieving mother this season, as Mrs. Gottlieb in Dead Man's Cell Phone. But while the former played to stylistic conventions and overexaggerated emotions, The December Man is painfully down to Earth. I can only marvel at Bakker's emotional availability; she proceeds through the play like an open nerve ending, firing at the slightest stimulus. In the early scenes she hovers constantly in the grips of anguish; in later scenes she oscillates between doting mother desperate to maintain a happy home and those gnawing moments of insecurity about what is happening with Jean. She is a six-sided die being shaken this way and that, but every moment is raw and visceral.

Jenna Maren's set is unusually intricate for the Refinery. It is a very complete feeling living room box set, with sofa, TV, coffee-table, and a Christmas tree from time to time. Then there is the wooden skyscraper model — Jean's last design project — off to stage left. There is nothing ostentatious about its placement, but it always draws our eye. The set needs to be full in order for the play to work. The characters need something solid behind them in order to contrast with the way they are disintegrating. This brings up a curious question about stylistic choice. After all, All My Sons had a fragmenting set existing in tandem with its fragmenting characters; such a decision worked for that play, and the opposite decision works for The December Man. The set remains solid and encompassing as a demonstration of how cruelly impartial the physical world is to the emotional scars laid by the tragedy.

Brian Cochrane may have, at some point, directed a happy play, but I did not see it. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this project makes his last Live Five entry, East of Berlin, look positively farcical. But he does bleak extraordinarily well. He brings Colleen Murphy's script to live in the most primal way, red hot and unflinching. I have been unsettled by plays before, and this was one of the more unsettling (though it's still got nothing on The Pillowman). As I said before, it is a play of small moments, and I can see the level of craft and detail that went into each one.

When tragedy happens, we tend to ask why. Then we don't get an answer and we move on. But for some people those people much more profoundly touched by the tragedy, they can't stop asking. As Benoit and Kathleen search backwards, peeling back the months and the years, attempting to find some explanation for why this happened to them, the play itself worms its way back through time, and at each stop the picture only gets more confusing. But amid that confusion shines one simple truth: that the search for meaning validates our loss. Each of the characters answers his or her own question of meaning, and while the choice they end up with is not a comfortable one for us to watch, it gives meaning to them. And therein lies the hope.