And Slowly Beauty

By Michel Nadeau and Maureen Labonté

Everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle-management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.
And Slowly Beauty, first performed in French in 2003, was created ­collaboratively by Michel Nadeau and colleagues from his Quebec troupe, Théâtre Niveau Parking. With the intensity of an electric current striking a reflecting pool, Nadeau shows us how Chekhov’s century-old drama about the yearning of three sisters in a dreary provincial town directly addresses Mann’s own stifled existence and liberates him from his self-imposed “gulag.”

Mann returns to see Three Sisters a second time, finding that its themes of beauty and poetry lost to the monotony of everyday existence mirror many aspects of his own existence. At the same time, Mann’s dying friend realizes that he is for the first time able to appreciate the astonishing beauty of trees outside his window. The irony of such a deathbed admission is not lost on Mr. Mann.

With Chekhov’s characters and themes coming to inhabit the protagonist’s mind and life, emphasized by the repeated image of geese flying overhead – these birds do not question the purpose of their journey but find it sufficient to fly in unison – And Slowly Beauty speaks eloquently to the power of art to transform lives.

Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780889227873

Michel Nadeau

Michel Nadeau is an actor, director, and playwright who has long been active in Quebec arts and culture. Since 1987, he has served as artistic director at Quebec City’s Théâtre Niveau Parking, and has been writer-in-residence at Théâtre du Trident, where he directed, among others, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. Nadeau has been a professor at Quebec’s national theatre and music school since 1986, where he teaches improvisation, dramatic movement, mask work, and commedia dell’arte.

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