Michel Tremblay

Three plays from the renowned Quebecois writer. The Guid Sisters is a Scots version of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs (Montreal, 1968), by Bill Findlay & Martin Bowman. Germaine Lauzon has won a million Green Shield stamps. She invites her female friends and relations to a party to paste the stamps into the books. The temptation to pilfer the stamps is irresistible and an enormous fight breaks out. Manon/Sandra is a controversial but humane duet crosscutting between the lives of Manon, an obsessively religious girl, and 'Sandra', a sex-obsessed transvestite. Albertine in Five Times is a one-act portrait of a woman at five different ages.

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victoire and her descendants through her husband and through her true love--who also happens to be her brother. It is Victoire's anger at being forced away from the family home and her sorrow at being separated from her dreamy, impractical, fiddle playing brother that fuel the machinery of 80 years of family relationships.

Michel Tremblay considers Bonjour, La, Bonjour to be the best of all his works. "In Bonjour, La, Bonjour, I apprehended the most of what I wanted to do in the theatre--to take out everything that is not strictly necessary." This new substantially revised translation by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco updates their original English translation of Bonjour, La, Bonjour which has been available from Talonbooks since 1975.

A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of four women and three men

It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive students; he has also realized that he will never be the great novelist he had hoped to become. He feels, in a word, mediocre. Luc, after years as an obscure stage actor, has found popular success playing "a nut case with a lisp" on a TV sitcom, but along with fame has come an unexpected and unwelcome loss of privacy and a struggle for self-respect. To make matters worse, Luc's father is dying. During this evening at Jean-Marc's house, the two men dredge up the good and the bad memories; they confront each other about past injustices; they examine each other's grey hairs; finally, they confess their fears and disillusionments and they comfort each other.

Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette's birthday party--and to have a little "impromptu"--at which they lash out at each other's personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the fifties, whose interest in art, music, dance and literature is an adopted pose, not their life's blood. Only one of the Beaugrand siters, Lorraine, has escaped her fate, running off with the Italian gardener to start a family in St. Leonard. The others remain in Outremont, trapped by time; by the choices they have not dared to make; by the position that society has foisted upon them--a position they have accepted, not fought for.

In Sainte-Carmen of the Main, Carmen--a character who appeared previously in Forever Yours, Marie-Lou--returns to the Rodeo from Nashville, where she has been sent to "improve her technique" in yodelling. But not only does she improve her technique, she also begins to write her own songs whose lyrics speak directly to the people about their problems, in words they understand. This challenging and profound play poses the question: "It's fine to wake people up, but once they're awake, what do you do with them?"

In Damnee Manon, Sacree Sandra, Michel Tremblay examines the sacred and the profane--their similarities and differences; how they merge and become one another. The play consists of two interweaving monologues on religion and sex spoken by Manon (from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou) and Sandra (from Hosanna). In the end, both characters realize that they have been "invented" by the author.

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer. Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant--only one of them, "the fat woman," is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circus-arena, confessional and battleground to her extended family, with ancient roots in both rural Quebec and the primordial land of the Saskatchewan Cree, stands an immaculately kept but seemingly empty house where the fates, Rose, Mauve, Violet and their mother Florence, only ever fleetingly and uncertainly glimpsed by those in a state of emotional extremis, are knitting the booties of what will become the children of a whole new nation. In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay allows his imagination free reign, fictionalizing the lives of his beloved characters, dramatized so brilliantly in his plays and remembered so poignantly in his memoirs." The fat woman" both is and is not Michel Tremblay's mother--her extended family and neighbours more than a symbol of a colonized people: abandoned and mocked by France; conquered and exploited by England; abused and terrorized by the Church; and forced into a war by Canada supporting the very powers that have crushed their spirit and twisted their souls since time immemorial. This is a "divine comedy" of the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people caught up by circumstances that span the range of the ridiculous to the sublime.

La Duchesse de Langeais and Other Plays is a collection of five short plays by Quebec's best known playwright, Michel Tremblay -- "La Duchesse de Langeais," "Berthe," "Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs," "Gloria Star" and "Surprise, Surprise."

En Pieces Detachees is Michel Tremblay's look at "The Main" in Montreal. The play concerns Helene, a waitress who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street. She is married to Henri, who sits around all day watching Captain Cartoons on television. They live in a tenement in the East End with their daughter, Francine, and Helene's mother, Robertine. During the course of the play, Helene's retarded brother, Claude, who has been "sent away" and who wears "sunglasses and speaks English" as his passport to the world, runs away from the brothers at the sanitorium and returns home for a little visit. En Pieces Detachees was first performed in Montreal in 1969. It was broadcast over French language CBC-TV in 1971 and 1972, drawing the largest audience in Quebec for a televised dramatization of a play. Cast of four women and two men.