As part of the Festival TransAmériques danse et théâtre, we attended the premiere of Le Théâtre Indépendant ‘s play Extérieur/Nuit at Théâtre Prospero last night.
The play can be seen until the end of the FTA festival; May 30, May 31, June 2 and June 3 (all performances at Théâtre Prospero, 9 p.m.).
The play is a dark night of the soul-like the dark night of the soul in the Save The Cat film-writing guide-with no end in sight-angoing, debilitating, but in an incredibly sophisticated stage setting that made us doubt our senses and hope that the day would still dawn for us the next morning.
We had the chance to chat with Charles Voyer, member of the Théâtre Indépendant collective and director of the play, after the premiere.
Exterior/Night
As I sat in the auditorium behind me, a man was telling his friend that he hadn’t been able to see the dress rehearsal because, having stayed outside before it began, he was afraid to open the door and let in the daylight. The play has to be performed in complete darkness.
Three characters wander, alone in the night. On the Théâtre Prospero’s small stage, a few simple set pieces divide the space into three tableaux: a studio, a bathroom and a foggy outdoor space (street/park) whose limits we can’t see.
An extremely sophisticated organization of pale neon lights and smoke that rises, falls, thickens and suddenly disappears creates an entire world of endless night that blurs the senses.
JJ Houle, who wrote the text for Extérieur/Nuit, has assembled several of his own texts, excerpts from writings and monologues, to create a kind of atmospheric thriller in which the characters tell their stories as if they were seeing themselves in a nightmare.
The spoken word is very violent, and the themes are not for the faint of heart, and the atmosphere of Extérieur/Nuit is conveyed to the audience with an almost wicked efficiency.
I ask Charles Voyer, who is the play’s director and also plays a clueless guy almost completely disconnected from his body but with the Hollywood name of Cody Ryan, to sum up the theme of this collection of lost souls. He replies that Outside/Night “explores the construction of identity as a function of the violence we have suffered and the violence we have inflicted on others”.
Without talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, and without justifying the agonizing symptoms of a life touched by violence, the characters (and the audience, by extension) undergo what Charles calls a “sensory derangement”, or a “sensory displacement” – which blurs reality, and gives the impression that the night will never end.
One of the elements of this disorientation is Charles’ talent for ventriloquism without a puppet, and when his character loses track of identity and reality, there’s a discrepancy between the movement of his lips and his words that’s as dizzying as it is impressive for the audience. Several times during the performance, I clean the lenses of my glasses and rub my eyes.
Charles Voyer, Théâtre Indépendant, FTA and the collective creative process
Charles is one of five members of theLe Théâtre Indépendant collective ( Charles Voyer, JJ Houle, Léo Gaudreault, Flavie Lemée and Antoine Racine), and despite the play’s very dark tone, he tells me that the creative process was a joyous one.
This is their second original play, after Le Gardien des Enfants (2022), a self-fiction in which Charles wrote and JJ Houle directed. The collective brings them together, each with his or her personal practice (technique, ventriloquism, writing), talents and creativity, in a “common language”.
They’ve known each other for a long time, some since Cegep, and have been preparing Extérieur/Nuit for two years. After a year, the FTA joined them as co-producer, which Charles and the collective saw as a kind of consecration, an indication that “all’s well”. They are already working on the next piece, while preparing an international tour for Extérieur/Nuit.
We can’t wait to see what the collective does with their third original piece, because their visual and scenic language is one of the most sophisticated and effective we’ve seen in a long time.
Enjoy the festival!