Winner of the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, Colleen Murphy’s The December Man is perhaps not what you’d expect from a play about the 1989 Montreal Massacre. It is not explicitly about violence against women; it is not explicitly about Marc Lépine, though Murphy conjures him with her title, and, of course, wouldn’t have her play without him. Instead her subject is Jean Émile Fournier — a fictionalized survivor of the incident, one of the men Lépine separated from the women he killed. Fournier’s father and mother are Murphy’s only other characters, and the entirety of the play is set in their house, beginning in March 1992 and going backwards in time from there, scene by scene.

“I didn’t try to steer clear of anything,” says Murphy when asked about The December Man’s paucity of feminist statements. “There are many stories in, and approaches to, an event, and none is more or less valid than another. My only concern with this, as a playwright who had never written about a real event before, was how to create fictional characters around a history that is still living and breathing. I didn’t want to steal from real people.

“The structure certainly helped with that,” she explains. “I think if I had adopted another, more linear approach, it would have just been exploitative and movie-of-the-week-ish. It would have forced the audience to move along with their emotions, their fears, knowing all the time that [Jean] was going to go to school and [the massacre] was going to happen.”

The backwards structure is important to how Murphy tackles The December Man’s central concept of trauma. One first sees a residual violent act caused by the more well-known one — both of which are larger than life, digestible only as sensationalized headlines — and then gradually comes to know how the two meet up. Internalization and sublimation are the main, maybe the only, gestures of the three characters. We discuss the work of filmmaker Alain Resnais, of whom Murphy is, it turns out, a big admirer (she herself is also an acclaimed filmmaker): in his films Hiroshima, mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel, past and memory colour everything, no matter how banal.

“In the play you never really see [Jean] alive,” she says. “You see him after the event, and he’s already on his way out. You only get glimmers of how much potential this young man had.
“You can say about these characters, ‘Oh my god, why can’t they just see a psychiatrist and get some help?’ But that’s a very middle-class point of view, and it’s a minority point of view. People do like to tell the story of something that’s happened to them, but they like to tell it when they’re the hero. It can be the smallest event, but they end up telling and retelling it. You rarely tell the story when you were the person who fucked up, who made the wrong decision — and yet that longing, that regret, is with you for the rest of your life.”