Colleen Murphy’s play The December Man (L’homme de décembre), inspired by the 1989 massacre of 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, examines the devastating effect the attack had on a working-class family.

Multi-award winning actress Nicola Lipman plays Kathleen Fournier, whose son, Jean, witnessed the cold-blooded killings.

Lipman says the play is not about the massacre itself, but about one family and how the parents thought that because their child wasn’t killed, everything would be okay.

“The event was the massacre, but there were indeed 40 students and two professors who left the room and left the women with a man who was going to kill them, and they have to live with that,” she says.

The critically acclaimed play won the 2006 Enbridge playRites Award and the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Drama.

“It’s about the trauma that this has on the survivors and [the people] close to those individuals,” Lipman says. “Like for Holocaust survivors – it is still… a horror, but what still remains and will remain forever are the reverberations from the survivors, the children of the survivors and the stories. That will keep it in the eye of history, and in a sense, that is what this play is doing.”

She says of her character Kathleen Fournier that because she and her husband had this child late in life, they looked at him as a blessing – a gift from God.

“She is someone who has invested everything in this child without realizing how much it is incumbent on the poor child to fulfil the dreams and go beyond. He would be the first in her family since coming to Quebec to graduate,” she says. “This is something people everywhere can relate to – they want their children to have a better life than they did.  She represents that kind of a person, and those feelings go beyond class, religion or nationality.  She doesn’t expect anything to go wrong.”

The British Columbian-born Jewish actress spent her early years in Brazil, where she attended Catholic school. Her British-born father Arthur Lipman, is a financial consultant whose work took the family there. Her late mother, Lucille Kaminer, was from Toronto. She was an actress and singer who performed as Lucille Cameron.

She attended the University of British Columbia before going to the National Theatre School in Montreal, and then devoted much of her life to the theatre. More recently, she has expanded into film and television. Although she owns a home in Kingsport, N.S.,  she’s rarely there, living most of her life out of a suitcase and gracing stages across the country.

Her life in the theatre affords her many opportunities to socialize; so when she’s alone, she enjoys some solitude and pastimes including gardening. Never married and with no children, she enjoys spending time with her 94-year-old father in Vancouver when her schedule allows.  Although he is not religious, she says she believes he is quite a Jewish scholar.

She herself is not religious either, but says she has a strong cultural affinity to Judaism.

Upcoming projects for Lipman include a national tour of Scorched and a new play by Joan McLeod, Another Home Invasion.

Canstage’s The December Man is at the Berkeley Street Theatre until May 17.  The play also stars Brian Dooley as Kathleen’s husband, Benoit, and newcomer Jeff Irving as their son, Jean.  It is directed by Micheline Chevrier.

For tickets to The December Man at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St., call 416-368-3110, Ticketmaster at  416-872-1111 or go to www.canstage.com.