When the Margaret Trudeau photographed in the 1970s dancing to her heart’s delight on the Studio 54 floor while her husband/Canadian prime minister Pierre was losing his reelection, when she was hobnobbing with the Rolling Stones, and when she was gallivanting to couturiers’ studios to run up exorbitant bills, those of us following her hard-to-miss antics had no idea we were witnessing someone in the throes of bipolar disorder.
Neither did she, although perhaps she had an inkling she was in thrall to something keeping her from being happy about her status as the wife of an internationally respected politician and the mother of three boys, including Justin Trudeau, Canada’s current prime minister. She may have vaguely understood that all the kicking-up-her-heels nightlife indicated a problem of a sort.
Indeed, it took her 25 years to grasp the medical truth and do something about it. She cops to the state of affairs (as different from affairs with the likes of Ryan O’Neal) in Margaret Trudeau: Certain Woman of an Age, which director Kimberly Senior, in her introduction at the Minetta Lane Theatre, calls “a work in progress.”
Now that Trudeau is on the other side of her diagnosis and its ups and downs, she’s eager to discuss what she’s endured. Her purpose in the piece co-written with Alex Sobler is helping anyone experiencing the problems she’s had to confront, or to help anyone who knows someone dealing with the painful condition.
There’s no gainsaying that the enthusiasm with which she goes about her crusade is commendable. As she speaks—occasionally reading from a script on a set featuring screens showing pertinent projections (Mike Tutaj is the projections manager)—she holds nothing back about her dazzling, dizzying life.
She begins when she was heading into her early twenties and spotted on a beach by Trudeau, who was in his early 50s. As she reports, he told a friend that if he ever married, it would be the girl over there. Only some time later did he call for a date, and the rest is the beginning of a history marked by a marriage to a controlling man when she truly had no idea what she was getting into.
Trudeau and Senior shape their 90-minute confession around questions that audience members read from cards handed them by a staffer. Each query is a prompt for Trudeau—who, by the way, is dressed down in white blouse and trousers–to wax autobiographical. She’s arranged it so that she chats about whether she’s a feminist, whether she believes in God, what it’s like to have been cheered for her beauty, and how she coped with the bipolar affliction and survived.
The set-up gives her latitude to explain—at greater length than is reported here—that she is a feminist; that she believes in God but, though she converted to Catholicism when she married Trudeau in 1971, she never really took to it; that her looks (reconfirmed by many of the projections) were as much a negative as a positive; and, as noted, that she has survived through diligent and daily work.
Along the way she covers matters such as describing each of her children (and the loss of one son), receiving no alimony from Trudeau in 1984 and so becoming a People photographer for a while, going on a compulsive trip to Paris and Crete, being accused of insulting Jimmy and Roslyn Carter when wearing a below-the-knees frock to a state dinner, thinking Mick Jagger was “arrogant” but cottoning to Ron Wood, also cottoning to Teddy Kennedy, enjoying a 1984-99 predominantly home-oriented marriage to Fred Kemper, and several episodes when she was institutionalized.
There’s lots more, of course, all of it delivered not simply with joviality but almost throughout with the physical bearing of a young adult performing for an older adult’s approval. She strikes arm-akimbo poses. She does some hip-thrusting. She negotiates a thin line between the acceptably appealing and the off-putting cutesie-poo. If Margaret Trudeau:Certain Woman of an Age is a work in progress, here’s where additional work can be considered.
Unlikely to change is a sequence where Trudeau suggests that in her earlier dissatisfaction she was restraining a “fuck you” attitude. She maintains she’s over that and is prepared to let go with the once-obscene (or is it still?) imperative whenever she wants to. She’s so pleased with the no longer suppressed urge that she coaxes audience members to shout it along with her. Some do. Some don’t. Later, she gets a similarly divided reaction when asking patrons to join her in a chorus of “love you.”
In other words how Trudeau expresses her abiding message in this Audible Theater presentation has its drawbacks, but what she ultimately wants to get across is so sincere it’s too courageous and important to dismiss.
Margaret Trudeau: Certain Woman of an Age opened September 12, 2019, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through September 14. Tickets and information: audible.com
