Comedic culture clash

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This article was published 06/01/2024 (980 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Xavier Huard isn’t afraid to say so: it’s harder to act well in a modern sitcom than in a classic tragedy.

“Sometimes we say as theatre artists that comedy is way harder than drama because it asks you to be as truthful as when you play tragedy,” says the actor, serving as director of AlterIndiens, the French adaptation of Ojibway humorist Drew Hayden Taylor’s culture-clash-at-dinner comedy at Théâtre Cercle Molière.

“Once you find the rhythm of comedy the actors have to surf atop it, and if the emotion isn’t true it will not make me laugh. It can fail very quickly.”

Without the com, all the audience can do is sit there.

A busy actor in Québécois film and TV, and a graduate of and instructor at the National Theatre School, Huard hasn’t allowed his formal training to sour his taste for the often-derided sitcom format.

But unlike David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the creators of Huard’s beloved Friends, the director and his AlterIndiens cast can’t rely on multiple seasons to build familiarity or emotion. The setup can’t feel too set up, and the laughter must flow freely rather than oozing without direction from the confines of a can.

To Huard, that’s all part of the challenge, and the appeal, of Taylor’s script, first produced in 1999 as AlterNatives.

In the show, a young Indigenous writer is ambushed by a surprise dinner party thrown by his non-Indigenous girlfriend, who invites her partner’s radical activist buddies — the AlterIndien Warriors — and her eco-leftie pals to the soirée for moose roast and vegan lasagna.

Taylor, a highly decorated writer, essayist and filmmaker from Curve Lake First Nation, has throughout his 30-plus-year career explored Indigeneity within the structures of family and tradition, and modern Canadian society through biting wit and satirical realism.

His first produced play, 1989’s Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock, follows a teenager on a vision quest who meets one ancient ancestor and another from the future.

Like that show, AlterIndiens, translated into French by Charles Bender, places its central characters in the middle of a game of cultural tug-of-war using the guise of comedy to dissect relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

That idea lined up directly with the mission statement of Productions Menuentakuan, the company formed in 2015 by Huard, who is not Indigenous, and Marco Collin and Bender, both of whom are.

“The idea we put forward was to create a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists could create together. We thought it would be beneficial to use theatre as a place to say what we need to say and share what we needed to share together,” says Huard.

Menuentakuan first produced AlterIndiens in 2019 after Bender, who has also translated into French works by Indigenous Canadian playwrights such as Maria Campbell and Kevin Loring, got his hands on Taylor’s original script. He and Huard were both struck by the fact that the then-20-year-old script felt so true to contemporary experience.

“It was really talking about something happening right then and there in Montreal,” says Huard.

The main character, Angel, wants to write science fiction, but is pressured by his partner to write about his Indigenous identity instead.

“It raises a lot of questions about what it is to be an Indigenous artist in a world that wants something from you, but not what you’re interested in,” Huard says.

The translated work is updated to suit the modern francophone audience, Huard says, but ultimately stays true to Taylor’s original vision, with which the entire cast and crew is intimately familiar: this past fall, Menuentakuan performed a three-week run of AlterNatives at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.

The cast includes a mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors, which Huard says helps give the sitcom that feeling of realness he seeks out in stage comedy. The actors embody Taylor’s larger-than-life characters, making it all look easy, he says.

“It looks so,” he says. “But it really isn’t.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com