It might take a few episodes in TV or an hour in film to empathize with a lead character. Actor France Perras demands it immediately in Jennifer Tremblay’s play The List by taking us into the soul of a woman punished by guilt.
On now at Gateway Theatre’s Studio B, The List is a powerful one-woman play blanketed in loneliness and regret, and served as an ace.
The hour-long play begins once the audience — queued in the lobby — begins to enter the quiet studio. It’s dark save for the light on the nameless woman played by Perras. She wastes no time to lay it on us: “Her death is my fault.” This is a woman who keeps a tight list. It’s detailed and she sticks to it. But one important entry — a favour to her friend and neighbour — she never managed to cross off. It became a “floating task,” one that moved from list to list and ultimately became a broken promise that leads to tragedy.
We’re given the woman’s story of how she moved to the country with her husband and children, in part to rejuvenate a troubled marriage. Instead, the woman finds isolation in this new rural life and her lists become an obsession.
Perras delivers the story while sitting on a chair surrounded by hanging household objects. With only a few studio lights to complement the scene, the actor is left to paint us pictures of a windswept landscape and a windswept mind. She does it well. As the woman searches for answers in this bare kitchen, the hanging objects — although difficult to see on the dark stage — remind us we’re travelling through her memories.
The List is an hour of power written in a unique form of fragmented storytelling. It begins and ends quietly, leaving us to ponder the moments in this woman’s life that are uncomfortably familiar — and re-examine our own crowded lists.
The List runs at Gateway Theatre’s Studio B until March 19. Tickets, $20 to $35, at gatewaytheatre.com or 604-270-1812.
