JFL42 & The Second City/A Certain Woman of an Age, written by Margaret Trudeau and Alix Sobler, directed by Kimberly Senior, Jane Mallet Theatre, Sept. 19 to 22. Tickets available at ticketmaster.ca.
Ignore the fact that two icons of comedy (Just for Laughs and Second City) are presenting Margaret Trudeau’s one-woman show A Certain Woman of an Age. Yes, there are plenty of laughs but this intimate story of her life is serious business when it comes to talking about her bipolar disorder which took twenty-five years to bring under control. For ninety minutes, the charming Trudeau reveals the good, the bad and the ugly, and it is compelling stuff with name-dropping galore and delicious insider tidbits. Yet at all times Trudeau is direct, honest and open, and that is how she wins our hearts and minds.
Unless you have been living on Mars, you will know that Trudeau was the wife of one Canadian prime minister (Pierre) and the mother of the current one (Justin). In between she managed to become a media darling in her own right by doing a lot of bad girl things such as running with the Rolling Stones (Ron Wood, not Mick Jagger), partying at New York’s infamous Club 54 with Andy Warhol, and having amours with the likes of actors Ryan O’Neal and Jack Nicholson, and American politician Teddy Kennedy.
She has at various times been an author, actress, photographer, and talk show host. In recent years, the mature and sober Trudeau, now age seventy-one, has devoted herself to good works, most importantly becoming a serious advocate for mental health and clean water in developing countries. Taken together, it makes for one heck of a tale.
The show began when producer Diane Alexander came out to inform us that A Certain Woman of an Age is a work-in-progress and that Trudeau would be reading from a script. The piece has already been performed in Chicago, Montreal and New York, with Toronto being the latest public workshop. She then introduced Trudeau who bounced onto the stage in a burst of energy wearing skinny jeans, a smart white blouse and red shoes. The set itself is composed of a screen for projecting a vast array of photographs and images that accompany her story.
The structure of the show is interesting. Trudeau’s assistant hands out envelopes containing five questions to audience members, and throughout the performance, Trudeau calls for them to be read out which triggers the next chapter, as it were, of her memoir. The five questions spur and control the narrative.
As Trudeau tells us, she’s done our work for us. We don’t have to ask questions because she’s asked them herself. Are you a feminist? Has it been hard to be so beautiful and admired? (Which got a huge laugh.) How did you first know you had bipolar disorder? Do you believe in god? How did you survive? The feminist question was important because it gave Trudeau a chance to show her feisty side and her current state of high self-esteem. She is no longer a captive to the patriarchal society. As she says, she found her “fuck you”, and led the audience in a chorus of “fuck yous”.
Admittedly, we were all waiting for the salacious details, and they came early and often, beginning with meeting Pierre Trudeau as a teenager at a Club Med in Tahiti, then marrying him in a secret wedding when she was just 23 and he was 51. He was, apparently, attracted to her hippie-dippie, flower child persona. In fact, their first conversation in Tahiti was Pierre grilling her about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll for three hours. She was more interested in Yves, the handsome water ski instructor. Apparently, while Pierre was progressive in policy, he was not so in marriage, and threw out copies of Ms. Magazine that Gloria Steinem had sent her.
Trudeau’s only role was being First Lady of Canada, and she felt suffocated, trapped at 24 Sussex with three small boys, and coping with an undiagnosed mental disorder. Her story goes downhill from there, including uncontrolled manic episodes, stays at psychiatric hospitals, and the tragic death of youngest son Michel in an avalanche in British Columbia when he was just 23, which literally sent her into psychosis and insanity.
Trudeau’s delivery is still the breathy little girl’s voice she’s had all her life, but she invests her talk with both enthusiasm and self-deprecating humour. Throughout, she is alive in the moment, and can certainly hold attention, although her speech pattern becomes repetitive over time. As stated before, she is a charmer. It would be impossible not to like her.
The take-away here is that Trudeau is a woman on a mission, and that is to focus on the horrors of an undiagnosed mental disorder from the inside. She tells us not to be afraid of taking drugs because they help control balance. Drugs are good, she says, as is cognitive behaviour therapy. She points out the devastating risk of denial, which led to the breakup of two marriages (the second to Ottawa real estate developer Fried Kemper).
We may have started out with “fuck yous”, but Trudeau is a woman who has found herself, and she leads the audience in a chorus of “love yous” at the end. She has four fine children, Justin and Sacha (Pierre), and Kyle and Alicia (Kemper), and ten beloved grandchildren. Her key word is resilience, which she calls the woman’s superpower.
A Certain Woman of an Age is a show about a life of failures and triumphs, and Trudeau reveals herself, warts and all, with relentless sincerity. It is time well spent.
#LUDWIGVAN
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