| The Revenge of the Underdogs William Weintraub’s satire of anglo life in an independent
Quebec is finally being staged in Montreal, Janice Kennedy reports.
Now we’ll find out if separatists actually have a sense of humour. |
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In
a scene from Underdogs, Stephanie Moore, playing an anglo, is interrogated
on her cultural knowledge by a Quebec government inspector (Pierre Lenoir). |
The invitation for Thursday night’s event, a crumpled, furtive-looking piece of paper, has “revolutionary underground” written all over it. The event itself, deep in Quebec’s heartland, looms as no less conspiratorial, a calculated incendiary mix of federalists and separatists, English-speakers, anglo warriors and anglo wusses. The event? The Montreal premiere of William Weintraub’s controversial play, The Underdogs. The conspiracy? To provoke gales of laughter from that incendiary mix of disparate opinion-holders. The Underdogs is being produced by Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival. Based on the Montreal writer’s own 1979 novel about imagined anglo life in a republican Quebec 20 years after separation, the comedy gets its first Quebec airing Thursday night at Montreal’s venerable Gesu Theatre. On the guest list are such names as Alliance Quebec head William Johnson, outspoken sovereignist Josee Legault, author Mordecai Richler, status-quo-disturbing cartoonist Terry (Aislin) Mosher, along with a dizzying array of federal and provincial politicians and high-profile pundits. “We invited everyone-everyone” says festival chief Andy Nulman. “This is a pretty big event.” It is indeed the homecoming of a play booted out of Montreal Centaur Theatre in 1989, eight weeks before it was scheduled to open. In the ensuing war of words, Centaur boss Maurice Podbrey claimed The Underdogs wasn’t ready for his stage and author Weintraub accused Podbrey of playing cowardly anglo politics. Two years ago, the play had its first unveiling in a Coburn, Ont. community theatre production- attended by numerous Toronto media types- and was given both an artistic and political thumbs-up. Writing in the Toronto Star, columnist Richard Gwyn observed that The Underdogs was very funny and “also very sad…because so many of these wild caricatures of oppression, originally written almost 20 years ago, are now so uncomfortably real.” Weintraub, a former journalist and National Film Board producer who also had difficulty getting television airtime for his documentary film The Rise and Fall of English Montreal, says, “I think the situation of The Underdogs is really the present situation largely exaggerated.” Janice Kennedy |
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