Twelve Opening Acts

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former assistant director of
libraries at the University of Saskatchewan Library. He is also
dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

Michel Tremblay has been likened to a Canadian Marcel Proust in
instalments. Twelve Opening Acts is one of three collections of
autobiographical récits recording the author’s awakening to major
themes that will eventually inform his oeuvre. Bambi and Me centred on
his discovery of cinema; here Michel discovers himself through exposure
to classic and modern theatre and opera for which he develops a passion.
It is a fitting companion piece to his celebrated theatrical paean to
his mother, the play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. Her familiar
melodramatic and operatic reactions to situations rub off on the son,
and both leap exuberantly into highly competitive duos at the drop of a
dry pastry or the hint of a lie. This does not prevent Tremblay’s
father from taking on a significant presence here, doubtless recalling
that of the deaf father in his early play Bonjour, lа, bonjour! in
which family dynamics are equally as complex. Twelve Opening Acts makes
us party to the cogitations of the child and teenager observing himself
and his family: “two never-ending dramas that go on being knit in
silence, the actors unaware that they’re being observed.” Hardly a
mere recounting of family anecdotes.

The eponymous dramatic turn of events within each of these stories is
often a profound realization of the reality beneath appearances. Here
Tremblay stumbles on the complicity of the audience (each spectator
believing that words are being spoken directly only to him) during a
theatre performance and agonizes over his own “inability to
participate in a collective jubilation.” It’s not surprising,
therefore, that his own literary path is fiercely independent and
popular, and that this volume culminates in the tale of his winning a
CBC competition with his first play, Le Train, amid mixed reactions not
only from those around him but, more significantly, within himself.
Meanwhile his experiences of theatre, opera, and even hockey provoke
such deeply personal moments as the realization of his parents’
complicity in any number of family dramas, his mother’s mortality, and
his own homosexuality. These are fascinating stories of a budding
genius.