[In the following review, Strunk finds Remember Me "a fine monodramatic miniature."]

[Remember Me is the translation] of Michel Tremblay's Les Anciennes Odeurs (1981), a one-act piece that explores the anxieties of two homosexual but not very gay ex-lovers ambushed by their mid-life crisis and the growing suspicion of their mediocrity. The mode is, or appears to be, relentlessly confessional: if it weren't for the pregnant silences that would have done Harold Pinter proud, the two figures would have talked themselves to death. Visually highlighting the confessional mode is the focal point of the piece, a large, wornout leather armchair in and in front of which Luc and Jean-Marc alternatively sit and kneel as they demonstrate strate that the need for affection is mutual.

The two had been living together for several years until the younger one, Luc, tired of being Jean-Marc's "cute little joyboy" and "disciple," decided to spread his wings. Evidently he didn't get very far; just back to "that darkness you'd hauled me out of," and that wasn't all fun and games. The setting he evokes smacks of Baal's ("I keep moving like a river, discharging my refuse into the sea!"), but unlike Brecht's amoral, polymorphous, perverse degenerate in search of orgiastic wriggles, Tremblay's Luc finds no celestial bliss in radical hedonism, since his pleasures in the gutter are circumscribed by his need to belong. That's why this bird returns to his former prison, his "big cage."

The master/slave relationship in this cage is acted out with an Oedipal vengeance since Jean-Marc, the dominant lover, college teacher by profession, also doubles as a father figure. In a gesture designed to signify his independence from his "father," Luc had moved out, though it's not long after re-entering his former prison that he feels "as if I'm talking to you like a son to his father … once again. It's true when all's said and done, you would have made a good father." In due course the prodigal son cries on "daddy's" shoulder and implores him to "Tell me a story like you did when I used to get depressed. Pretend you're my father one last time. When he's dead, I won't ask you again."

"He" is Luc's terminally ill real father, reportedly incapable of attending to his son's "stories," yet craving a proper send-off from Luc's lover. As a solution to parental despotism this is of course bound to fail, but the ending is not all bleak because Jean-Marc conveniently undermines his own status as surrogate father by becoming a fellow sufferer, a "brother," as it were, and thereby seems to prepare the ground for true companionship.

All this is about as undramatic as it can get, since the real conflict between Luc and his surrogate father just withers away as Jean-Marc discovers that he, too, is tired of playing games. But is this really what the play is all about? Has Tremblay been writing a silly little naturalistic milieu study demonstrating that not all is well in fairyland? Not one bit. Although the play can be approached as a realistic specimen, it makes its far greater impact as a rather sinister monodrama.

The prospect of a happy ending to this many-mirrored play is somewhat diminished by the fact that the place of the action—Jean-Marc's basement study—is a spatial pretext and that Luc's entry ("My goodness, a ghost!") is that of an unappeased ghost in the subconscious. The translator must have known what he was doing when he chose the title Remember Me, which recalls the ghost of Hamlet's father. The title is appropriate in a different sense, too. The man whom we see in the beginning marking papers has left no other mark. Rapidly approaching 40, the teacher/writer with one "utterly boring," "utterly useless" novel to his credit, yearns "to leave some indelible mark on the world, whereas in fact nobody will remember me, they'll just remember my 'disciples'—as you so snidely refer to them, since you're one yourself."

The "rotating" confessional mode the play adopts serves as the great leveller: in the realm where all are mediocre, none is, and that could be the premise of a renewed friendship. But a somewhat different picture begins to emerge if we see Luc's confessions—indeed his whole character—as the projection of the man in the basement who had always wanted to become what Luc is: an actor. Instead he has become a spectator, or more precisely, since he is self-conscious to a fault, a voyeur of himself. He used to get through the worst moments of his childhood by "watching myself on an imaginary screen playing my own role in an endless adventure film." But that doesn't work any longer, because "Whenever I try to recapture that state of grace which once did wonders for me, it's you I see, playing my role." And how does one cope with such an apparition, how does one accommodate one's envy of "the other" who has left his mark on the world? Well, one turns this mark into a stain—or better still, lets Luc himself turn the mark and imprint he made into a "stain," a "blemish." And finally one reduces him to the non-entity of one's mirror image: at the end we see Luc at Jean-Marc's desk, marking papers and repeating Jean-Marc's opening line, "Two mistakes in the title alone…. Incredible!"

Remember Me is a fine monodramatic miniature. One would like to see this translation performed soon, though one would also like to see the playwright break out of the miniature mold.