Here’s a view of Porte Parole’s 2nd Annual SPEAKeasy, as an impressionist painter of the Roaring 20s might have seen it… Held at the lovely Le Lion d’Or, our poker night gathered a bunch of fun-loving players who challenged one another and Lady Luck herself in order to claim great prizes while supporting a good cause: Porte Parole and its groundbreaking doc theatre. A winning combination. Those of you who missed it should bet on being there next year!

Leave your troubles at the door, and join us for a poppin’ night of poker, hooch and swinging tunes.

Here’s the lowdown:

What: A ritzy evening of poker and booze to support Porte Parole

When: Tuesday, January 17th, 2012, from 6:00 pm

Where: Le Lion D’or, 1676 Ontario East

How: $100 gets you a couple of booze tickets, some nibbles and a little poker dough ($1 500) to start you off (along with a $75 tax receipt).

6:00 pm: Welcome

7:00 pm: Poker

9:30 pm: End of silent auction

10:30 pm: End of poker tournament and winners’ announcements.

Check the dialog about it on this Facebook page.

A scene from Sexy béton. Photo: Robert Etcheverry

Porte Parole’s tour of Sexy béton finished with a flourish on December 4^th in St-Jean-sur-le-Richelieu with an enthusiastic audience of over 400 people.  Generally, the play inspired a keen interest everywhere it went – reaching over 2,000 spectators in 10 performances. Many audience members expressed gratitude for a play that portrays ordinary Quebec citizens attempting to navigate through today’s overly bureaucratic and prohibitively expensive justice system.

A few comments from the audience:

“Cette compagnie théâtrale n’a pas fini de faire des vagues.” Serge Côté

“J’y étais et c’était formidable! bravo!“ Josée Gosselin

“Bravo pour l’audace.“ Micheline Benoit.

A warm “thank you” to our audience. And thanks once again to the tour’s team and actors for the top-notch quality of their work.

Viaduc de la Concorde, 09-2006

The following text by Annabel Soutar was published in The Gazette as a letter to the Editor:

4 years ago I decided to write a play called Sexy béton about the collapse of the de la Concorde overpass in Laval. Though I was moved by the tragic consequences of the incident, my decision to write a play was inspired by the poetic quality of this real story. A bridge is a symbol of connectedness. When a bridge falls down, it indicates a failure in the structures that support a middle ground between two disconnected entities. When a bridge called ‘Concorde’ – a Latin word meaning harmony – collapses, the universe is screaming out for someone to appreciate the resonance of the event. I remember asking myself the question back in 2006: “Is it possible that something broader than an overpass in Laval is crumbling in Quebec? What is our failing infrastructure trying to tell me about myself and about my relationship to society?”

Interestingly, I discovered, the de la Concorde overpass collapse was not the first instance of serious road system failure in Quebec, but it was the first event to really grab our attention. In 2000, the de Souvenir overpass above highway 15 fell down and killed one man, Gilbert Vinson. A Coroner’s Inquest into the incident did not provoke enough media attention to nourish our own interest in the tragedy beyond the initial gory, sensationalist details. The collapse of a structure called ‘Memory’ was, ironically, largely forgotten 6 years later when de la Concorde woke us up again.

When I started to research my play about de la Concorde by interviewing Transport Ministry engineers, officials involved in the Johnson Public Inquiry Commission, construction business executives, and specialists in bridge architecture, I always started with the question “Why do you think this structure fell down?” The responses I received all varied in terms of their content, but the subtext of each testimony was surprisingly consistent: de la Concorde’s collapse was ‘nobody’s fault, and was certainly not symptomatic of any deeper problems in our society. It was a “freak accident” that perhaps pointed to a need for more investment in infrastructure maintenance in the province, but it certainly did not reflect any broader political, cultural or ethical issues.I was perplexed by these responses because my gut instinct was that the de la Concorde collapse involved me in some way that I wasn’t aware of. Contrary to the knee-jerk response of most government officials who wanted to distance themselves from the event, I wanted to get closer to it, to figure out how, as a citizen of Quebec, it was possible that I had not been aware of the terrible state of my province’s road network and why I had never held myself or my democratically elected government to account for infrastructure degradation.
I started interviewing some of the survivors of the collapse, as well as family members of those who died on September 30th, 2006. I learned that the collapse of de la Concorde has been classified as a “car accident” for compensation purposes, and that the victims had received the same type of compensation from the SAAQ as if they had been involved in a mere fender bender. I learned that the Transport Ministry had disregarded all of the victims’ attempts to seek recognition of, or better compensation for, the terrible injuries and losses that they had suffered. I learned by reading the transcripts of the Johnson Commission that engineers and construction executives, from both the public and private sector, had spent thousands of dollars in lawyers fees proving that they had nothing to do with the collapse, but never saw it as their duty to articulate any kind of accountability for something they collectively built and maintained.

The portrait that was surfacing of my society through these interviews and research made me feel deeply ashamed. I wondered about how our leaders behaved in times of crisis? I wondered why, when something fell down, people ran away like mischievous children saying “it wasn’t me!” Most of all, I asked myself, “what can I do about it?” What can one person do to try to shift an entire culture that collectively avoids responsibility?’
The answer was obvious: I had to take ownership of the problem myself instead of wondering why no one else was doing anything about it. But how can I take ownership of something as complex as infrastructure failure?
The tricky thing about infrastructure is that it’s a collective entity. Infrastructure construction is often demanded by the public, commissioned by the government, designed and built by a group of engineers within multiple corporations, and maintained by government engineers whose salaries are sustained by a tax paying citizens. At the end of the day, who is responsible for such a structure? The answer I kept getting in my research was “nobody”. But why can’t the answer be “everybody”?

Is it possible for us, as a citizenry, to each ask ourselves “what am I doing to allow infrastructure to degrade and to fail in Quebec?” Maybe the answer to that question would actually give us some constructive ideas to understand our collective responsibility for infrastructure failure better. Maybe by answering that question together we will start to rebuild some of the “harmony” that has gone missing from our public dialogue. When I look at the headlines in the newspapers yesterday reporting Sunday’s collapse of a portion of the Ville Marie tunnel, I am not confident about our ability to communicate constructively about infrastructure anymore.
I invite everyone who reads this letter to try to answer the above question, and to post it somewhere where the public can read it. I will start by asking myself the question and answering it right now.

Annabel, what did you do to allow public infrastructure to degrade and to fail so deplorably over the past few decades?

Answer: Many things. I never pay attention when politicians debate the infrastructure budget in the National Assembly. I have complained for many years about how decrepit the roads look in Quebec but I haven’t done anything about it. I naively hope the government will eventually fix the problem, but I know deep down that they won’t. I know that the construction industry is corrupt but I don’t believe I can do anything about it. I am too shy to speak up in public about a complex issue like infrastructure because I might sound stupid. I don’t want people to think of me as a “radical political person” so I don’t usually write letters to the editor. And, quite honestly, I didn’t really care about infrastructure in Quebec until people got killed when an overpass collapsed on top of them.

Voilà un autre exemple qui démontre que le fédéral refuse d’accorder au Québec et à sa métropole un traitement équitable comparable à ce qu’il accorde aux métropoles des provinces. Here is yet another example that shows that the federal government refuses to give Quebec and its cities the same treatment as that of the cities in the other provinces. Gilles Duceppe.

In Duceppe’s world, it’s as if the rampant corruption scandals in Quebec’s construction sector had never happened. To recap for anyone that didn’t yet get to see our play Sexy béton, Quebec’s infrastructure has been in a sorry shapes for decades, largely down to a) proven shoddy workmanship and b) poor maintenance and c) construction companies redirecting money from infrastructure itself and into the pockets of mafiosos instead.

Because of the deplorable state of the infrastructure here, Quebeckers have witnessed two fatal bridge collapses in the last decade – a total body count of seven. Lumps of concrete routinely fall from the Turcot Exchange and various other dilapidated pieces of infrastructure. Two summers ago, a lump of concrete fell from a hotel on rue Peel, smashed through the roof of a restaurant below, immediately killed a woman and sliced off the arm of her dining companion, her husband.

But naturally the Bloc’s not asking who is going to clean up Quebec’s corrupt construction sector. That’s not the kind of question that allows Gilles Duceppe to wag his finger sanctimoniously in the direction of Ottawa.

Porte Parole invites you to SPEAKeasy a decadent, swanky, 1920s poker party featuring drinks, light hors d’oeuvres, raffle prizes, dancing to the jazzy stylings of DJ Myles Hainsworth and of course…. poker!

There will be two tiers of poker playing: you can play casually with professional dealers (we’ll even have a “Teach Table” if you want to learn the basics) and the top grosser at the end of the night will win a beautiful painting by Kai McCall! For the high rollers out there, we’ll have limited spots at 3 Tournament Tables, where you’ll be competing for the Grand Prize – 2 tickets behind the bench at an early 2011/12 Habs game – hosted by the Molson Brothers!

At the end of the poker playing, you can buy raffle tickets with your leftover chips. A few of the raffle prizes so far:

• Photography by Serge Clément
• Gym membership at Club Mansfield
• Tickets to a concert, accompanied by former Gazette music critic (now film critic) T’Cha Dunlevy
• Sommelier-extraordinaire Bill Zacharkiw to host a wine tasting event in your home
• “Tastes of Montreal” guided city bike tour for 2 with My Bicyclette
• Gift certificate at Lola & Emily
• Gift certificate for Cosabella Lingerie
• 2 spots at the Living Foods (Cuisine Vivante) workshop offered by Restaurant Crudessence
• Gift certificate for Tavan & Mitto
• Gift certificate from ALDO Group

7pm Thursday February 24, 2011 • Poker begins promptly at 8pm
Le Lion D’Or, 1676 Ontario St. E., corner Papineau

Regular ticket: $100 • High Roller ticket: $200

Tax receipts for 75% of the ticket price will be issued.

Appropriate attire from the Roaring ‘20s is strongly encouraged

For more information, or to reserve your ticket, please email stephblanshay@hotmail.com

Sexy béton, among the Mirror’s Top 10 plays of 2010, is presented in French at TDP’s Salle Fred-Barry, February 9th to 26th. Reserve now! Ticket office: 514-253-8954

A bouquet of flowers left at the site of the broken overpass in 2006.

On this day in 2006, the de la Concorde overpass collapsed onto Highway 19 killing Mathieu Goyette, his pregnant girlfriend Véronique Binette, Jean-Pierre Hamel and his wife Sylive Beaudet, and his brother Gilles Hamel. 6 other people driving over the bridge were badly injured in the incident: Mohamed Ashraff Umberthambi, Louise Bédard, Paul Cousineau, Robert Hotte, Anne Leblanc, and Claude Bastien.

As far as I can see, not one major newspaper in Montreal or the English CBC has mentioned this important anniversary today. Sept 30th will therefore pass Montreal by without a moment of reflection about de la Concorde.

Do Montrealers know that the collapse was declared a ‘car accident’ by the Quebec government and that the victims received paltry compensation packages from the SAAQ? Some of the survivors of the collapse are still struggling today with ongoing physical and psychological problems that have completely transformed their lives for the worse.

Even if the mainstream media didn’t find it ‘newsworthy’ to recognize the victims, surely they can’t believe that the de la Concorde collapse is no longer relevant today politically. With ongoing corruption problems in the construction industry, the extraordinary allegations of influence-peddling at the highest echelons of the Quebec government coming out of the Bastarache Commission, the problems at the Mercier and Champlain bridges, the ongoing debate about Turcot (I could go on and on here…) – don’t you think the 4th anniversary presents us with an opportunity to remember the tragic consequences of our dysfunctional infrastructure system?

To quote one of the characters in Sexy béton, Maria Mercadante (wife of one of the victims of the collapse): What are we waiting for? Another bridge to fall down on our heads?

Photo by shmilblick

So September 30th is coming up again, this will be the fourth year since the fatal Concorde overpass collapse. What have we learned in four years? What is being done? What has changed? I regret to say that these pressing questions have gotten a bit dusty. While the Concorde victims and families will remember September 30th as a sad day, the end of a life or the end of the hope of pursuing justice in the legal realm, will Quebec citizens even remember the date? With the flurry of things happening in our world, it’s not surprising that this type of anniversary gets overlooked especially when the media seems to want to make sure there is nothing left to say about it. For example, last October, La Presse came out with an article to close the debate: “Concorde Overpass: The Victims Will Not Pursue”. That’s it, there’s nothing else to say except maybe that it’s the Prime Minister’s prerogative now to give the victims more money. So hopefully he’ll be thinking about Concorde on September 30th…