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| Quebec playwright and icon Michel Marc Bouchard |
This is an expanded version of Bugs' interview with Michel Marc Bouchard that originally ran in Daily Xtra on May 17, 2016.
Quebec
playwright and icon Michel Marc Bouchard casts queer life versus religion, and
condemns religion while celebrating queer sexuality in his landmark 1987 play Les
Feluettes ou la répétition d’un drame romantique.
Considered one of the major works of modern Canadian theatre,
the English-language adaption, Lilies, won the Dora Mavor Moore Award and
the Chalmers Award for best play in 1991. Even the film version by John Greyson
won the Genie Award for best motion picture in 1996.
And
now, Les Feluettes will be coming to a different stage — as an opera.
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| Les Feluettes stars Etienne Dupuis and Jean-Michel Richer |
The play’s hotly-anticipated opera version makes its historic world premiere at the Opéra de Montréal in May 2016. Les Feluettes also garners the distinction of being the first ever French-language opera about a (tragic) gay love story.
After
Australian composer Kevin March saw Greyson’s adaptation in 2003, he was
inspired to create an opera version. It would be another decade before the
Opéra de Montréal commissioned March and Bouchard to create Les Feluettes.
The opera stars baritone Etienne Dupuis and tenor Jean-Michel Richer as the two
lovers.
Even
though Les Feluettes features the character Bilodeau, a repressed
young gay man who joins the seminary only to become a closeted Catholic Bishop,
Bouchard is adamant that his work is mainly about two men falling in love. “I
don’t have a political agenda,” he says. “It was never my goal to pit church
and religion against gay life. My dream was to a write a love story. Les
Feluettes is like Romeo and Juliet. It is about a man who tells
another man, ‘I love you.’”
Bouchard’s
work, however, usually does involve the intersection of young queers and
religion — two identities that he grew up with in Quebec. “Coming out didn’t
exist for me the way it does today,” he says. “When I was 20 years old, I drove
from Ottawa to Lac-Saint-Jean and told my parents I was gay because I wanted to
be an author. As gay people we learn to live a lie, and I believed a writer had
to be honest.” And that honesty benefits a younger generation as well. “Growing
up queer is always difficult, which is why I want [young LGBT people] to see
themselves in my plays,” he says.
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| Les Feluettes stars Etienne Dupuis and Jean-Michel Richer (Photo by Yves Renaud) |
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| Etienne Dupuis and Jean-Michel Richer rehearse Les Feluettes (Photo by Richard Burnett) |
While
young queers figure prominently in plays by Bouchard, such as in his Shaw
Festival-commissioned The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, Bouchard has also
made his mark on young artists like filmmaker Xavier Dolan, whose 2013 film Tom
at the Farm is based on Bouchard’s play Tom à la ferme. Says
Bouchard, “One night Xavier saw my play. He was smoking outside with some
actors after the performance and told me, ‘Let’s make a movie!’ Xavier is an
extremely gifted artist. There is Xavier the spectacle, and there is Xavier the
passionate hard worker, and that is the Xavier I know. I am pleased my work
resonates with a younger generation.”
Bouchard
was less pleased with his experience scripting the film The Girl King, adapted
from his own play about Christina, the lesbian queen who ruled Sweden in the
mid-17th century. “It was a long journey,” he says diplomatically.
As
for making John Greyson’s film Lilies, Bouchard says he was “fascinated” by the
whole experience. “I was happy we made the film, and that we – French and
English – did it together.”
Bouchard,
for his part, hopes Les Feluettes is the beginning of a new wave of
queer-themed operas.
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| Bugs meets LGBTQ hero Michel Marc Bouchard |
“Rufus
Wainwright is writing Hadrian, then after that it will be us with La
Reine-Garçon,” says Bouchard about two new high-profile operas commissioned by
the Canadian Opera Company, scheduled for the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 seasons
respectively.
As
for Les Feluettes, Bouchard remains optimistic. “Some days I am scared:
Montreal’s opera house seats 3,000 people and opera lovers come to the opera
armed with knives in their teeth! But I think the world of opera is ready for
our stories. It is historic to see a French opera with a large orchestra where
two men fall in love and sing to each other onstage. It has never been done
before. We shall soon see if we help raise the glass ceiling.”
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