The late Jean Drapeau, Montreal’s love-him-or-hate-him mayor of the 1970s, was famously proven wrong after boasting in 1973 that “the Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.”
Not only did the Big Owe, as Montreal’s problematic Olympic Stadium was dubbed, spark a colossal deficit, Billy Crystal (Rabbit Test) and Arnold Schwarzennegger (Junior) also later demonstrated a man can give birth — in bad movies, anyway.
In My Pregnant Brother, Montreal writer-performer Johanna Nutter takes this notion from the realm of the ridiculous to reality. Her hour-long solo show at the Uno Festival is an engaging, smartly conceived portrait of her life in a dysfunctional family, and the impact of being arbitrarily designated caregiver, particularly to her younger female-to-male transgendered brother who, to her paralyzing astonishment, became pregnant amid his transition — a state he’s woefully unprepared for.
Under Jeremy Taylor’s steady, unobtrusive direction, Nutter captivates us from the start, when she literally draws her own set — chalk drawings of Montreal’s Le Plateau district, including renderings of Mount Royal, Park Avenue, Boulevard St. Laurent and Sherbrooke and St. Denis streets — on a black stage, bare except for a white rocking chair and a red package.
Her white blouse and colourless polka-dot skirt complement the show’s black-and-white design scheme, yet there’s nothing black-and-white about the material. It’s blotted with shades of grey flecked with brightness as Nutter, a natural raconteur, effectively toggles between darkness and humour while relating her bizarre yet deeply personal true-life tale.
Nutter’s recollections of pronoun issues, a “transitional” period when she referred to her sister-turned-brother as her “sibling,” or when she rationalizes the weirdness of his pregnancy — “He’s a man with a big beer belly” — are particularly amusing.
“Gender confusion has its perks,” she says, recalling how he somehow scored a private hospital room to give birth.
Nutter also deftly mines her one-woman show’s more heart-wrenching potential, as when she recalls her “voiceless howl” in reaction to her brother’s most desperate decision. And the way she incorporates Montreal — comparing the sound of a baby’s heartbeat to the “thumps of a car going over Jacques Cartier Bridge,” for instance — has a kind of urban poetry to it.
Indeed, her descriptions of the family’s physical world, where her aging hippie mom would sculpt a replica of a holiday turkey out of brown rice, with carrots as drumsticks, are as potently evocative as her mimicry of her troubled brother’s demeanour.
My Pregnant Brother is less about transgenderism, however, than gender identity, motherhood, family dynamics and other issues many should be able to relate to. While Nutter’s tell-it-like-it-is piece could lose about 10 minutes of extraneous detail, such as her Zorba the Greek obsession, it’s a potent reminder that fact can indeed be stranger than fiction.
My Pregnant Brother
Where: Intrepid Theatre Club
When: Thursday, 8:30 (French version: Mon frere est encient), Friday, 7 p.m.; Sunday, 8 p.m.
Tickets: ticketrocket.org, 250-590-9291
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of five
Uno Fest continues until June 1 at Intrepid Theatre Club and Metro Studio. Schedule and info at intrepidtheatre.com.
