Loss of small-town landmarks gives rise to Québécois playwright André Gélineau's S’effondrent les vidéoclubs
With humour and colourful characters, new play explores the parallels between a dying lake, a doomed videostore, and solitudes
André Gélineau.
Théâtre La Seizième presents S’effondrent les vidéoclubs in French with English surtitles May 25 to June 4 at Studio 16. Meet the Artists takes place May 27 in French and June 3 in French and English.
NEAR THE SMALL village of Saint-François-Xavier-De-Brompton in Quebec where playwright André Gélineau grew up is Lac Tomcod, or Petit lac Saint-François. His parents forbade him from swimming in it.
“I was not allowed to go in it not because they were afraid that I would drown, but because they were afraid I would be poisoned,” Gélineau tells Stir via a Zoom interview in French. “It is very, very, very polluted. People threw old tires in there and all kinds of trash, and over time, the lake has really deteriorated. It is going to die.”
Gélineau is now based in Sherbrooke, where he collaborates as a playwright and director with organizations such as Petit Théâtre de Sherbrooke and Centre culturel de l’Université de Sherbrooke, among others, and lectures at the university. Just as that lake was a local landmark, so was the town video store, a place where he hung out with his pals. He remembers it vividly, right down to its peculiar odour. And just like the doomed body of water, its fate, too, was certain to come to an end.
“It had a very particular smell, a very damp smell, and at the same time a smell of popcorn,” Gélineau says. “But it still had a special feeling at the same time. For me it was an important place in my youth; I went with friends, we met girls, we discussed films; it became a social place, a meeting place, a place of exchange, and this place, too, is destined to die because people are streaming, because of Netflix.
“Then I thought to myself, there's something interesting about the end of landmarks, the end of a meeting place,” he adds. “The lake was the origin that drew people to settle in this village. And then I saw the parallel of the fall of this video store, the arc of the video store, with the lake being destined to die.”
Those indelible marks on his early life formed the jumping-off point for Gélineau’s new play, S’effondrent les vidéoclubs (meaning “video stores are collapsing”), which is having its world premiere in Vancouver.
Gélineau has written a four-hander, which will be directed by Gilles Poulin-Denis and performed by Yurij Kis, France Perras, Maxim Racicot-Doucet, Frédérique Roussel. The characters consist of the owner of the video store, a woman who welcomes the shop’s end because she is exhausted from trying to keep it going and dreams of transforming it into a centre for aesthetics care and the lonely gentleman who lives above the store and seeks out social connection within it. A young couple who work in the store decide to make a documentary about the store’s final month. With the film based on actual happenings and people in a place filled with fictional stories, the play itself slides from fact to fiction, giving it a surreal edge as it explores people’s inner lives.
“In writing the story about the end of the video store, by extension we talk about our solitudes, which are a little more present because of the way we consume movies now—by streaming and by having more virtual encounters,” Gélineau says. “It’s more and more difficult to outsmart our loneliness. You don’t necessarily have all those places around you anymore, those traditions, rites, and rituals that make you meet together in one place. Not having the physical place that makes being together necessary, then, accentuates our solitudes.
“It may sound very sad, but I infused a lot of comic elements,” he’s quick to add. “My characters are very colourful. Even though these people are doomed to be separated, there is a colour that makes them very endearing.”
The pandemic certainly underlined feelings of loneliness that come from not being able to be with others in public places and made Gélineau appreciate the power of live theatre even more.
“The fact of being together to tell each other stories, I think, brings us not just an awareness of ourselves but an awareness of us, of a collective,” he says. “This is something that has always fascinated me. We can watch TV, but the theatre is one of the places where it is still possible to meet, to be together, and I like that the theatre can have a unifying aspect, even if we are not always aware of it. The fact of understanding who we are as humans together, for me, is stronger than understanding who I am alone.”
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