Rougarou is a work in progress written and directed by Damion LeClair for unnecessary mountain theatre.  On Saturday and Sunday it was given in a semi-workshop format in partnership with Native Earth at Aki Studio as part of Summerworks.

The format was basically a reading with one actor playing all the parts and a second person “setting the stage” as there were no sets or props, though the sound design, or at least part of it, was included.  I think the intent at this point is for the finished product to use two (or perhaps more) actors; one playing the main character Renee and another perhaps playing everyone else but I’m not sure of that.

The story takes the Métis legend of the Rougarou and links it to Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.  The Rougarou is a dangerous, violent shapeshifter who lives off the negative energy of the fear he creates and off the life force of his victims.  He traditionally preys on women alone and often at night in lonely places.  Hence the link to MMIWG.  He can also invade the brain of potential victims.

Renee, rather brilliantly played by the extremely versatile Lynny Jeanne-Marie Bonin, is a young Métis woman who has already lost her mother and sister.  Although the mother’s body is found there’s no identified murderer and the sister has just disappeared.  In the wake of all this Renee moves from Williams Lake to the lower East side of Vancouver trading one kind of squalour and poverty for another.  The Rougarou invades her dreams.  We learn her story in flashbacks to her childhood and then the disappearance of her sister and her father’s self destructive drinking.

Eventually she gets the phone call that her father has finally drunk himself to death and she returns to Williams Lake to clear things up.  The Rougarou puts in a final appearance and comes for Renee.  The ending is clever and a bit of a surprise.  I hope I have all this straight as with Bonin playing all the parts it’s sometimes hard to tell who is doing what to who!  The Rougarou is not the only shapeshifter!

As it was a workshop I think I’m OK to offer suggestions on what worked well and where things might be tightened.  Overall, there’s a tension between the reality of the life of this family at the very bottom of the socio-economic pile and some kind of hope based on a less awful real, imagined or imperfectly remembered ancestral past.  It sometimes makes the girls’ childhood seem almost idyllic; at least as long as their mother is alive and yet it equally obviously isn’t.  I’ve seen this treated more ironically in work by people like Tomson Highway to good effect.  There’s also the issue of the girls “escaping” by watching cheesy horror films together.  I think this is a really powerful idea and it does yield an excellent surprise ending but I wonder whether it might not be exploited more.  Injecting some of the horror movie clichés might, I think, help with the irony.  The sound design, as we heard it, is excellent.

It’s hard to judge a play on a workshop form like this but I think there’s definitely an effective work here.  The basic concept is sound and it’s well worked out plotwise.  The use of flashbacks is effective.  I think I’d like to see something a bit darker and more ironic and I think there are ways of achieving that.  If it comes back to Toronto as a finished work I’ll definitely be lining up to see it.

Illustration by Emily Cooper.