“We knew we’d have to do something really big for the people who supported us,” says Mike Payette.

The Tableau d’Hôte co-founder is on the phone from Edmonton, making his way eastward, stage by stage, as he plays Bagheera the Panther in a Geordie Productions tour of The Jungle Book. When the tour’s over, he’ll be back in Montreal for a short week of rehearsals before he’s dropped into a production his collaborator, Mat Perron, will already have started.

The two have conceived the most ambitious project in the company’s history, tackling all six plays in the Suburban Motel series by gritty Toronto playwright George F. Walker, a taxi driver turned multiple-award-winning author and giant of the Canadian stage.

Actors Mike Hughes, Tamara Brown, Eric Davis and Joel Fishbane and directors Olivier Perras and Liz Valdez are among the more than 35 “friends of Tableau d’Hôte” who return to mark the company’s fifth anniversary with the new production—their lucky 13th.

“There’s a special affinity with Walker’s work for both Mike and I,” Perron says, “but it’s not strictly for that reason we chose it. It’s something we’ve been talking about since our first year—but we were nowhere near ready then. Last year, we saw MainLine was available for a month, we knew we were going to be celebrating our fifth year and wanted to do it with a bang, and we figured—why not give ourselves the ultimate challenge and produce six plays simultaneously?”

Each of the full-length, one-act plays happen in the same setting: a slightly run-down motel on the outskirts of a large city. Prostitutes, drug addicts, ex-cons, a social worker, a pregnant waitress and a drunken cop all figure in Walker’s nightmarish world. Characters drift from one play to the next. Exploitation, revenge, cover-ups, gambling debts and pornography litter the dark—and darkly humorous—emotional landscape.

Originally, Perron proposed to direct all six shows himself, before realizing it was an impossible task. Payette, too, had a moment of grandeur before he came to his senses. “In my mind,” he laughs, “I thought, ‘I can do all six. I can make it happen!’”

Instead, as they did with actors whom they had worked with over the years, Payette and Perron invited directors from past productions on board. Nobody in the project was pre-cast; instead, their early collaborators were invited to be part of a huge, evolving project and as it began to take shape, actor, director, and story were matched up.

Already, the scale of the production is opening up new and different possibilities for the company: a play from Payette based on ’80s soap operas is coming up, and at some point in the near future, a Tableau d’Hôte musical.

“I think one of the things that differentiates us from other companies,” says Perron, “is that we don’t stick to a particular formula. So long as it’s Canadian and it’s never been done in this city, we’ll go for it.”

SUBURBAN MOTEL NOV. 10–29 AT THE
MAINLINE THEATRE (3997 ST-LAURENT).
INFO: (514) 849-3378,
TABLEAUDHOTETHEATRE.CA