TORONTO – Productions like Montparnasse remind me that I need to keep more booze in the house. When Mags, an American model living in 1920s Paris, awakes mid-day in her slip and looped pearls (a rare clothed moment) and grabs the champagne bottle by her bed as she begins to relate the spasmodic, erotic details of her previous night’s tryst with a celebrated painter, I think—I need to get out more. What am I doing, sitting here thinking about how I’m going to write about this later? I shouldn’t spend my time typing! I need to live, like Mags! Go, Mags, to the corner bars and nightclubs, to the studios and bedrooms of grossly talented and sensually obsessed men. Go mostly for your plugged up roommate, Amelia, newly arrived would-be painter, escaping the Christian Temperance Union America but not yet ready to enter the raunchy haunts you inhabit, where inspiration wets the walls and is more easily absorbed than a soixante-quinze cocktail, liberally poured. Go for Amelia, but also for us who want so badly for art to exist in these places, these dark, smoky, stinking, dizzying, only half-real dens of urban dawn, where nothing—beauty, morality, freedom—stands up to examination. It’s too dark in there, and everyone is too drunk.
Unfortunately, all the party girls die in the end, and it’s sad, terribly sad, their names and ends read out like a military death record: model A, suicide; model B, flu; model C, opium. So perhaps the message here is not “the nobleness of pleasure” (or, perhaps more relevantly, considering our time and place, “party ‘til you puke”), but sacrifice. The muse is sacrificed to the ravages of art, just as the artist is sacrificed to the appearance (and disappearance) of the muse. And what Montparnasse so ingeniously invites its audience to do (and without the help of more than an hour, more than two actors, more than the most minimal set and lighting effects) is identify the real creator of the masterwork. Is it the hand that moves the brush, as Amelia insists, or the muse who moves the hand to paint, as Mags suggests? And who, more importantly, is more replaceable? For at its core, this is a play about mortality. Everyone is trying to be beautiful forever. Mags, at least, succeeds in that; her figure, whether mostly hers or mostly born of the gaze of the men who paint her, will live on and on, even if she herself never makes it out of Paris.
Montparnasse written and performed by Maev Beaty and Erin Shields.
Directed by Andrea Donaldson
www.summerworks.ca
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