For the last eight years, celebrated Quebecois performer Marie Brassard has been having a recurring dream in public. Her oft-performed dream-play Jimmy is about a gay hairdresser and the homophobic American general who fantasizes about him. Tonight, Montreal audiences will get their first chance to catch this remarkable solo piece in English when Brassard’s company, Infrarouge, dreams Jimmy and his general onto the Centaur stage.

Existing only as a figment of the slumbering general’s repressed imagination, Jimmy encounters a soldier in his salon and is just about to share a consummating kiss, when the general dies in his sleep. Jimmy is instantly catapulted into limbo until, fifty years later, he’s dreamed into being again by a Montreal actress.

Which is where, of course, Brassard comes in, giving voice and form to the understandably confused Jimmy while becoming increasingly besotted with him.

First performed in 2001, Jimmy has such an enticingly outlandish premise that one needs to ask how on earth Brassard dreamed it up.

“It originated from the fact that I wrote down my dreams for three years,” she says. “I ended up with some really amazing and complex stories, and I decided it would be nice to do something with this material. In dream plays, it’s usually the dreamer who is the protagonist, so I thought it would be interesting to turn that around and have not the dreamer but the dreamed as the protagonist.”

So Jimmy was somebody who really did appear in a dream? “Oh no. I was improvising one day with a voice processor machine, when I found myself talking with the voice of a gay hairdresser. It’s such a clichéd joke, but then I thought it could be a good idea to play a woman playing this man. So I created a scenario in which Jimmy navigates his way through those dreams I’d written down.”

Never one to shy away from exploiting technology on the stage, Brassard uses the voice processor machine throughout the performance to transform herself into the multifarious characters. Picturing Brassard barking “Don’t ask, don’t tell!” through the voice processor, I ask if the sexually conflicted general was also a result of improvisation. “No,” she says, laughing gleefully, “he did come to me in a dream!”

With its startling juxtapositions and chimerical elisions between different states of reality, Jimmy shares, on the face of it, unmistakable similarities with the work of Brassard’s erstwhile creative partner, Robert Lepage. Brassard, however, good-humouredly notes what makes her subsequent work different.

“For Robert, it’s the image that’s important. Visually speaking, his plays are always very stunning, whereas I’ve been moving more and more towards a theatre where sound and music are most important.”

Alongside Jimmy, Brassard’s company will also be presenting a revival of The Glass Eye, her collaboration with veteran performer Louis Negin. Based on Negin’s gilded memories of 1940s Montreal, it has Negin, under Brassard’s direction, spinning a series of sad, funny, and possibly fanciful recollections involving nightclubs, film stars, gangsters, and amorous hits and near-misses.

“Louis comes from such a different background than I. He’s attracted to all the glamour of Hollywood, the golden years of cinema and so on. He’s had so many exciting and moving experiences. The show is basically Louis telling us these stories from his past, some of which are real, some of which are fictional. It’s very difficult to tell which is which, but I didn’t really want to find out. They belong to him. For me all of them sounded true, so I considered all of them as being true.”

Jimmy plays at Centaur Theatre tonight through Nov. 29. The Glass Eye plays Dec. 2 through Dec. 6. Box Office: 514-288-3161. For more details, go to the Centaur site.

Tagged as: Centaur Theatre, Jimmy, Marie Brassard, Robert Lepage