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The Centaur Theatre appropriately opened the penultimate show of its season on Holy Thursday with Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Madonna Painter: Birth of a Painting under the direction of Roy Surette. Bouchard is a prolific Québecois playwright whose works have brought our unique culture abroad, having been translated into nine languages. In this poetic and evocative piece, Bouchard weaves the tale of a young priest brought to a small town in Lac Saint-Jean in the fall of 1918 to instil hope in a small population ravaged both by war and an outbreak of the Spanish Flu.

The spiritual leader commissions an Italian painter to create a triptych depicting the Virgin Mary as a means to ward off the pandemic and restore faith to the inhabitants of the village, including a doctor of questionable moral standards with a taste for butchery. The young girls of the village are man-starved nymphettes thinking almost exclusively of marital bliss. The painter must select one of them to pose as the Madonna and nearly everyone is shocked when he selects Mary of the Secrets, a stigmatised member of the society who is believed to have a divine gift.

What follows is a story that follows the old creative writing adage “show and don’t tell” almost to a fault. Bouchard’s stunning scenes give us tableaus of beautiful images and elaborate language that are truly captivating. What is lost to this style is a strong dramatic impetus because the audience is appreciating each scene separately as one would a painting without tension necessarily building up between them. We must applaud Linda Garboriau’s translation because she brings the imagery in Bouchard’s language to life, making use of such tropes as repetition without making any of the word choices seem heavy or inaccurate.

The performances of the young horny village girls (stand outs Stefanie Buxton, Luncinda Davis and Amelia Sargisson) are breaths of fresh air when we can literally smell the putrid scent of decaying, disease ridden corpses thanks to Bouchard’s poetic morbidity. Without them, the play would quickly feel like a sermon, and an awfully depressing one at that. Jean Leclerc delivers a chilling performance as the enigmatic Doctor who recognizes the destructive power beauty  can hold when it represent s an unattainable ideal as symbolized by Graham Cutherbertson’s role of The Young Priest. Moreover, The Doctor represents our human drive to destroy beauty and render it profane rather than try to ascend to the ranks of the sacred. Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe as the worldly painter and his virgin model bring startling intensity and chemistry to the stage that one would not expect from their first encounter.