(Handout)

On Dec. 6, 1989, crazed gunman Marc Lepine massacred 14 female engineering students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

Before he opened fire on them, Lepine freed the male students in the class.

Colleen Murphy’s heart-wrenching drama The December Man playing at Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge PlayRites Festival is a hypothetical account of the impact this unfathomable tragedy has on one of those male students.

Jean (Rylan Wilkie) is a shy boy from a working class family. His mother Kathleen (Nancy Beatty) cleans houses for wealthy families and his father Benoit (Brian Dooley) is a factory worker. To tell their story, Murphy uses reverse chronology. In the first scene Benoit and Kathleen are committing suicide. Each subsequent scene moves closer to that fateful day when Jean escapes the massacre and to the climax of the play. Jean and his parents are understandably elated he has been spared but the audience can’t share in their happiness because we already know this moment of joy will turn to unbearable grief. It is a stroke of genius on Murphy’s part to tell the story backwards a device Harold Pinter used for similar compelling effect in his 1978 drama Betrayal. Not only is the drama in December Man heightened because of this theatrical device, but the comic moments have a bitter sting to them.
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