The stage in Maison de la culture Maisonneuve glows violet. It is late September 2024 and a packed audience is seated bistro-style, enjoying a drink in anticipation of the performance version of Amélie Prévost and Rachel McCrum’s La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother. This hybrid show, straddling a combination of spoken word and theatre conventions, is presented bilingually in French and English. It is ambitious: written, translated, workshopped, produced, recited, and acted out by Prévost and McCrum themselves, with directorial guidance from Elkahna Talbi. As the room dims, the first words reach the listeners:

“We could be 36 or 47 years old, 

we could be francophone or anglophone […] 

We’d be a woman like any other, or like none. 

One thing’s for sure, we wouldn’t have any children,

not in the usual sense”

The title La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother is reasonably self-explanatory. Prévost and McCrum tell me in a recent interview how they bonded over their mutual stepparenting experience, over the difficulties of living in proximity to budding adolescence without the intimacy or authority of a biological parent, of loving a man who will always put his child first, and of trying their best and those attempts not necessarily being well-received. “Where was the rule book? How were we supposed to manage all this?” McCrum asks me rhetorically. “Why were there no good examples of stepparenting for us to follow?” 

Resisting negative stereotypes so prevalent in popular culture – think of the evil stepmother in Grimm fairy tales or Disney cartoons – Prévost and McCrum construct a more authentic and nuanced prototype of the contemporary stepmother. Their stepmother is not specific to a single identity or experience; she ranges in age, look, profession, and more. Yet she also coheres as cisgendered and heterosexual, a woman struggling with the cultural idealization of motherhood within the confining expectations of the nuclear family.

La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother
Amélie Prévost and Rachel McCrum

Éditions l’Hexagone
$21.95
paper
120pp
9782896481729

A series of twenty-one dramatic monologues, the print version of La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother follows in a long tradition of poetic ventriloquism that ventures into narrative, lyrical, and speculative terrains. The book is structured as an alternating weave between the voices of the Stepmother and the so-called Blue Voice – a more theoretical intervention into the subject matter, contrasting against the narrative strand of the Stepmother’s anecdotes. In this way, Prévost and McCrum are able to share scenes that ring true – the fond memory of a single Halloween enjoyed with the stepchild, or the worry about a budding eating disorder – and to allude to fictional or historical archetypes – such as Jesus, who was raised by his stepfather Joseph. As interpreted by the Blue Voice, Joseph was a selfless, accepting stepparent, whose story is still neglected in the Bible:

“After so many years

of an imperfect but constant love,

Joseph didn’t even merit

his own chapter in the Book.

No funeral, no flowers,

not a word to say

Thanks for the Sunday brunches

and the tool box.

the times when the other father was working in such mysterious ways”

Here the stepparent, Joseph, is clearly more present than the biological parent who, in this case, is the New Testament God. With this example, Prévost and McCrum initiate a pattern demonstrated throughout the book: On the one hand, the stepparent is shown to be capable and nurturing, even superior to the biological parent who might be absent, overworked, or incompetent. On the other hand, despite their best efforts and successes, the stepparent  does not receive the same level of acceptance as the biological parent. They can never be as loved or as good. 

The unfairness of this imbalance means that La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother can be challenging, at times, in its sense of baseline hopelessness. As the poem “Doubts” admits, “We know that we’ve only shown the worst of it, / that we’ve given you no good stories, / no happy endings.” Even as the book delves into the complexities of the role, the difficulty of stepparenting is never denied. McCrum explains in our interview that the book is “confronting, but it has to be. Otherwise, everything is still repressed and hidden.”

The move towards honesty and openness about the tough realities of stepparenting is exactly what makes La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother a celebration of this often demonized familial role. As Prévost tells me, the project hopes that “shared [stepmothering] experience could be useful to others.” McCrum adds that this “shared experience” includes a mélange of “confusion and negotiation and reward and tenderness.” The stepmother character’s ability to commit to the father and his child, despite the challenges, setbacks, continuous affective labour, and the latent desire for autonomy as a childless woman,  allows her to eventually grow close to and express her love for the stepchild. 

Prévost and McCrum do the work of delving into the difficult topics, experiences, and emotions, and it is this commitment to understanding what it means to be present and responsible for another life that serves as testament to their dedication to the family unit of which they now form a part. As Prévost suggests during our interview, the formation of certain families might adopt structures alternative to the traditional nuclear unit, but they will always exist as a gathering place where “we learn how to interact with others, how to love one another, how to share space with one another.” This “strange family […with] big, supple arms” is the one that Prévost and McCrum acknowledge and embrace.

Prévost, a poet, playwright, and actor (who also happens to be the 2016 Slam World Champion), and McCrum, an event organizer, editor, and co-host of the Mythic Porcupine writing residency in Cacouna, are both active community-makers in Montreal’s local literary and theatre scenes. The sociality and relationality with which they approach their individual and collaborative practices shine through in La Belle-Mère / The Stepmother. Not only does the work engage thematically with interpersonal dynamics, it also expands formally beyond print culture into embodied recitation and live artistic expression. Both on the page and the stage, this is a feminist project, one which imagines new modalities for intimate cohabitation and kinship, and posits care not only as an act of giving, but also of receiving, of being true to oneself – whether that self qualifies as stepmother or exists independently as woman. mRb