Family bickering and a current of violence keep things dark and edgy in ‘Public Enemy’

Canadian Stage boldly launches its 2022-23 season with artistic director Brendan Healy’s incisive production of this troubling 2015 play by Québécois provocateur Olivier Choinière.

First staged in Montréal as “Ennemi Publique,” and translated and adapted for this production by Bobby Theodore, the play is set during two family dinner parties set one year apart.

The overall conceit, which is jarring and mesmerizing in equal measure, is that the family members talk over each other — just like people do in real life, but not usually seen on stage. The viewer is challenged to make choices about how to handle this: do you lock into one conversation, or allow yourself to drift between them?

I found myself doing the latter because Choinière’s point, I think, is exactly the tendency of contemporary conversation to be full of half-made, half-baked arguments and opinions. Here’s elderly mother Elizabeth (Rosemary Dunsmore) spouting annoyance about how kids these days and radio presenters don’t know how to speak properly (Theodore has adapted the play to reflect local culture; CBC broadcasters Jelena Adzic and Matt Galloway are name-checked).

Here’s adult son James (Jonathan Goad) dwelling on 9/11 conspiracy theories, and ranting about the control of the Bilderberg Group over global finance. His brother Daniel (Matthew Edison) initially seems like the most rational of the group, patiently arguing back against his mother’s extreme views on Quebec cardiologist-turned-child-killer Guy Turcotte. Sister Melissa (Michelle Monteith) first seems passive and reasonable but reveals harshly punitive parenting tendencies as the play goes on.

It’s not just the grown-ups at these parties: Melissa’s 11-year-old daughter Olivia (Maja Vujicic) and James’s teen son Tyler (Finley Burke) are also present, and an initial tableau cues us to be attentive to Olivia’s vantage on what happens.

As prescribed in Choinière’s text, Julie Fox’s set sits on a revolve, and after about the first 12 minutes of dialogue, the set turns a third of the way around, and the same scene is replayed from the perspective of the kids in the living room. The acting here is astonishingly nuanced as Burke’s Tyler ekes out casual cruelty on his younger cousin — making up a story about vermin in the furniture, for example — and Vujicic’s Olivia works to absorb it. Their older family bickers on in the other room and occasionally draws the children in, as when James calls on his son to name the capital city of Ontario and mocks him when he can’t.

What an array of violence in this household: talked about, psychological, and brewing under the surface. When it finally explodes, the trigger is money and legacy, which takes the play in an interesting and unexpected direction deeper into the family’s power dynamics.

Choinière moves into an exploration of bias and class in the final section of the 90-minute-long drama, which takes place a year later and introduces a new character, Daniel’s casually racist new girlfriend Suzie (Amy Rutherford). One has the sense that this portion of the play may have hit more precisely in Québec where debates over immigration and the wearing of public religious symbols have been top of the news round for many years, but Rutherford plays the scene fearlessly and impeccably.

Ming Wong’s costumes play into the uneasiness of the scene in signaling that Suzie is dragging Daniel down the class ladder: while he was the preppiest of the bunch in the first half, here he looks like a character out of “The Sopranos.” This feels somewhat obvious in a play and production that otherwise very skilfully keep on challenging the audience to consider our assumptions about what makes people virtuous or unvirtuous, clear-eyed or self-deluded, victim or aggressor.

The production values overall are top-notch, adding to the sense of mounting disquiet — music in Richard Feren’s sound design coming from somewhere uneasily offstage, and his sound along with Kimberley Purtell’s lighting evoking an urban wilderness just outside this unhappy family’s immediate environment in several balcony scenes.

The precision of Healy’s production and the acting company’s extraordinary ability to deliver the demands of the script (the overlapping continues throughout) are impressive. But then I found myself feeling discomfited that I was enjoying watching this spectacle of unhappiness. The tone remains ambiguous until the end, as Dunsmore’s mighty matriarch lights up a cigarette and stares out into the night as her family bickers on.

Public Enemy

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