At face value, Under the Linden Trees is a gripping enough story to take in at Théâtre Cercle Molière: a daughter on a mission to recover the body of her brother who died while carrying out a terrorist attack. Some fifteen years earlier, her parents also were the perpetrators of a failed coup d’etat, and even though she abhors her family’s violent causes, she still sets out to retrieve her brother’s remains.
This plot puts Under the Linden Trees squarely in the category of a Greek tragedy, where the audience already knows the sad outcome, but will spend time exploring the “why” of how the characters got to this point. This is done intentionally by Manitoba playwright Bertrand Nayet, who set this play as a mirror companion to Sophocles’ classic Antigone. It also presents a unique challenge for the actors who must dive into territories of introspection and self-examination and portray that for an audience.
This journey of introspection has occupied Katrine Deniset and Phillipe Habeck throughout the process of creating Under the Linden Trees, which opened on November 20. “It’s hard to dissociate what’s going on with these big themes,” Deniset observed in a conversation with Nolan Kehler on Morning Light.
“That’s the beauty of a tragedy,” Habeck added. “I remember one of my favourite authors said, ‘What's fun with tragedy, though it's sort of dark, is that you know what's going to happen.’ It’s not a drama where there is hope. There's going to be death. And as a spectator of watching the show, you're more into the fact of going why and what would I do if I was in that same situation?”
Both Deniset and Habeck are well aware of the challenges that come with presenting such large, existential questions that don’t have satisfying answers. In an age where undivided attention is harder and harder to obtain, inviting an audience into this space to deal with tough issues like how to love someone in your family even though they hold vastly different world views than you do is a big ask.
“It’s spiritual,” said Habeck when asked about what role tragic drama has in a modern entertainment ecosystem. “You're sitting there and you're thinking throughout and it's relaxing.”
“It’s super important if we can get over the boredom. Because that is the bane of our society – that kids and adults cannot be allowed to be bored. Therefore, we're living in this entertainment world of going quick, quick, quick, funny, sad, always changing over that way. You don't have a chance to think about the 'why’s’, and that's what tragedy does."
For Deniset, this pursuit of ambiguous truth is a very grounding one that helps her to relate to the world and question her place and role within it. “I think if we don’t think about these things as actors, people won’t, either. It’s like throwing the ball back to the audience and I hope they have the same conversations we had.”
Under the Linden Trees is on stage at Théâtre Cercle Molière until November 30. For tickets and more information, you can visit their website.