PRESS KIT(English and French)

FREDY

2017-03-31, 11)51 AMQuebec play Fredy raises questions about power and story ownership - The Globe and Mail

Page 1 of 3http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/quebec-…ons-about-power-and-story-ownership/article32818049/?service=print

AdChoices

Annabel Soutar takes a journalistic approach to theatre with Fredy.

Quebec play Fredy raises questions about powerand story ownershipRobert Everett-GreenPublished Friday, Nov. 11, 2016 01:03PM ESTLast updated Friday, Nov. 11, 2016 04:29PM EST

In Of Montreal, Robert Everett-Green writes weekly about the people, places and events that makeMontreal a distinctive cultural capital.

The final scene of Annabel Soutar’s documentary play Fredy, as seen last spring at Montreal’s ThéâtreLa Licorne, contained an unusual coup de théâtre. One of the cast stepped forward and read his ownopen letter to the playwright, in which he questioned her methods and her conclusions about the play’ssubject, the 2008 shooting death by Montreal police of a young Honduran refugee named FredyVillanueva. “You might write a good story,” he said, “but you’ll never write the truth.”

The actor was Ricardo Lamour, who is also part of a committee formed in support of the Villanuevafamily. He had written his letter with the idea of sending it out to media, but when he mentioned it toSoutar, she suggested he read it to her audiences instead, and take a role in the play. Lamour played thejudge at the 2013 inquiry into Fredy’s death, and then, as himself, delivered his verdict on Soutar’sdocumentary theatre project every night for 21 performances.

2017-03-31, 11)51 AMQuebec play Fredy raises questions about power and story ownership - The Globe and Mail

Page 2 of 3http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/quebec-…ons-about-power-and-story-ownership/article32818049/?service=print

Recently, Lamour wrote a sequel to his monologue, and sent it to journalists. It accuses Soutar ofappropriating and commodifying the tragedy of others, and says that Lamour will have nothing more todo with Fredy, which Soutar’s Porte Parole company is preparing for a possible tour of Quebec.

My first thought on reading this was: Why now, and not during or before the shows last March? In aphone interview, Lamour said he had joined the cast with the hope of steering the production in a moretruthful direction, but saw after a June meeting between Soutar and Fredy Villanueva’s mother Lilianthat no better outcome was possible. “Lilian said, ‘Maybe you should step out,’ ” he said. “So I steppedout.”

Soutar is a “verbatim” playwright, who constructs her scripts from what others have said or writtenabout a story related to some social, political or environmental issue. The Watershed, which opened onTuesday at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, is about the abuse and protection of water. You could say thatFredy is about race, policing and social justice – but it’s also about a young man, who was unarmedwhen shot during a 60-second encounter with police.

From the start, the Villanueva family and its support committee believed that a play called Fredy shouldhave more to say about the title character. Soutar’s issue-oriented focus was never aligned with thatgoal, as she readily admits. She was trying to portray a violent incident and its aftermath, and useddialogue from many sources, including the testimony of the police and the courtroom words of theirlawyer. That was too much for the Villanuevas and their committee, whose letters of protest also endedup in the play.

Lamour faulted Soutar for “humanizing” the police, and for depoliticizing the consequence of theiractions. But Soutar, who responded via her own open letter and a phone interview, said it was not herbusiness to tell the audience what to think, or to exclude pertinent voices from the story. Airing whatwas said during the inquiry, she believed, was likely to generate “deeper empathy [for Fredy and hisfamily] than if I had put a political pamphlet on the stage.”

In many ways, Soutar’s method is classically journalistic: listen to all sides, try to represent them fairly,exclude your own bias – and air the possibility that bias remains. “I really feel that I did my duediligence, and tried to be very transparent, and held myself to account,” she said. “I think my authoritywas questioned in the play several times.” She also changed her script in line with some criticisms andsuggestions by the Villanuevas’ support committee.

But Lamour compared her method to that of a wildcat miner, for whom everyone and everything issubject to an “extractive logic,” whose final goal is to mould the assets acquired into a cultural productthat benefits the author.

“Whose story is it?” he said. Pointing to the name of Soutar’s company, which means “spokesperson” (orliterally, “word carrier”), he said: “Let’s make sure that the people to whom you are giving voice arecomfortable with what you’re putting out there.”

That never happened, he said. “Annabel likes to talk about dialogue, and was very wise about whatbuttons to push,” he said. But he felt there was an imbalance of power and ultimately a lack of respectfrom her side, epitomized by the play’s implacable progress towards its first production, in spite of whatthe family might say.

The fracas over Fredy is similar to that which erupted around John Adams’s opera The Death ofKlinghoffer, which portrayed the murder in 1985 of an elderly Jewish passenger on a cruise ship bymembers of the Palestinian Liberation Front. Klinghoffer’s daughters condemned the opera as anti-Semitic and sympathetic to terrorism, and it was shunned by some companies that had agreed toperform it.

2017-03-31, 11)51 AMQuebec play Fredy raises questions about power and story ownership - The Globe and Mail

Page 3 of 3http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/quebec-…ons-about-power-and-story-ownership/article32818049/?service=print

The Villanuevas’ opposition hasn’t had anything like that effect on Fredy, but their complaint, asrepresented by Lamour, is also more personal. They didn’t want their son’s and brother’s name attachedto a play that represented him with a pair of empty shoes, he said. They wanted a kind of respect – fortheir kinship and their suffering – that they felt they didn’t get from Soutar, who had the means and thesocial capital to proceed without them.

“It was not my intention to have the last word about Fredy,” Soutar said. “I’m thinking about modifyingthe title, and we certainly have to consider a new ending.” Characteristically, however, Lamour’sdeparture from the cast probably won’t get him out of the play. Soutar plans to incorporate this latestplot twist into future productions. “I’ve always loved it when documentaries continue beyond their firstperformance, and expand into the living community in which they have been produced,” she said.

Those words also articulate what Lamour experiences as the ongoing nightmare of this production.Whatever anyone says against the show – and Soutar’s method – seems fair game to be added to it. Thisis where the world-views of playwright and actor diverge most sharply. What Soutar sees astransparency and expansion looks to Lamour like a strategy for maintaining an unshakable hold on anystory, without regard for who may be hurt or exposed to further notoriety.

Lamour’s query – “Whose story is it?” – is perhaps the central question, especially when the power ofthe teller is so much greater than that of those about whom she is speaking. However we answer, it’s aquestion that extends far beyond a single play, throughout a society where young brown men are still atunusual risk of being shot by police.

© 2017 The Globe and Mail Inc. All Rights Reserved.