from the script of Tom at the Farm
by Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Losing someone suddenly is a thread that snaps, breaking the ties to the other person, the man who is no longer there. The survival instinct takes over and the unravelled pieces of life try to piece themselves together with other unravelled pieces. It hardly matters with whom or with what. Other people become synonymous with the one who is no longer there: a brother, a son, a lover.
Following the accidental death of his lover, trying to get his bearings, Tom goes to the country to meet his in-laws, perfect strangers. In this austere rural environment, the neophyte in life finds himself tangled up in a story where synonyms arc merely a declension of lies.
The lover, the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival because one day, in this same rural setting, one young man destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy. years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom.
Adolescence is the period in which the individual‘s personality evolves from that of a child to that of an adult. This evolution begins with sexual maturity and ends with social maturity. This is the crucial point in life when the diktats of normality have the most devastating effect on those who are marginal.
Every day, young homosexuals are victims of aggression in schoolyards, at home, at work, on playing fields, in both urban and rural environments. Every day, they are insulted, ostracized, attacked, mocked, humiliated, wounded, beaten, taxed, soiled, isolated, tricked. Some recover, others don’t. Some become the mythmakers of their own lives.
The rejection of homosexuals is not an obsolete subject as some would have us believe, especially those who arc tired of hearing about it or those who believe that if the media have covered this subject, like so many others, someone must be taking care of it.
I also experimented with several happy endings for this play, hut stories of reconciliation too easily relieve us of our responsibility to find solutions to conflicts. The moral of those stories is pre-fabricated.
Let me try this phrase: We can all lend an ear to the pain of love, somehow. in some way, every day.
Homosexuals learn to lie before they learn to love. We are courageous mythomaniacs.
-Michel Marc Bouchard
Tom at the Farm is on stage at Buddies April 11 – May 15, 2015.
photo of Michael Marc Bouchard by Julie Perreault
