Not strictly a monologue — though all acted and spoken by a single, very gifted actress, Sylvie Drapeau — this is the narrative, mostly in dialogue form, of portions of the life of a daughter and her dying mother: her absentee father (dissipated, alcoholic and abusive to the mother, yet loved by his daughter), her stepfather (likewise abusive to both mother and daughter but a better provider than the biological father), and her beloved half-brother (sired by her stepfather).
The drama is about the dying mother’s wish to see her son (alienated from her by the reliable stepfather who eventually abandoned both the mother and his stepdaughter(s), taking his son, age 8, with him, never to see his mother again). The themes are men’s violence and apathy toward their spouses and female kin. Most of the dialogue is the daughter trying, by telling him about their past, to persuade her half-brother by telephone to fulfill his dying mother’s wish. (We are left to imagine why he does not already know the story, why he has not been told before, how she can be on good terms with her half-brother despite the rupture and alienation, and what the real character of the mother was, aside from being a victim. We sense that she would have preferred a better life, a better spouse, and that she did the best she could under the circumstances.)
The play has some ambivalent anti-clerical aspects too: The usual impulse to commune with a just deity and the repulsion at the injustices, unprevented, unpunished. A “wise” priest is another fleeting personage in the drama.
In the end, the half-brother is not persuaded to “reconcile” with his mother, so the daughter can only use her mother’s last fading consciousness to give her the verbal illusion that her son has come back to her, and is there.
All this is well-evoked, both by Jennifer Tremblay’s text and by Sylvie Drapeau’s moving performance. In the open discussion with the cast after the play it was repeatedly affirmed that the play evokes familiar familal themes in Quebec. Are male abusiveness and female victimhood really that universal a part of the fabric of Quebec society?