Michel Tremblay
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Michel Tremblay (born June 25, 1942) is an important Quebec novelist and playwright.
Born in Montreal, Tremblay grew up in the French-speaking part of the Plateau in Montreal, whose working-class character and joual dialect would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first play, Les Belles-Sœurs, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. Its impact was huge, bringing down the old guard of Canadian theatre and introducing joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying the lives of working class women and attacking the strait-laced, deeply religious society of mid-20th century Quebec.
The most profound and lasting effects of Tremblay's early plays, including Hosanna and La Duchesse de Langeais, were the barriers they toppled in Quebec society. Until the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, Tremblay saw Quebec as a poor, working-class province dominated by an English-speaking elite and the Catholic Church. Tremblay's work was part of a vanguard of liberal, nationalist thought that helped create an essentially modern society.
His most famous plays are usually centered on female characters. The women are usually strong but possessed with demons they must vanquish. It is said he sees Quebec as a matriarchal society. He is considered one of the best playwrights for women.
In the late 1980s, Les Belles-Soeurs ("The Sisters-in-Law") was produced in Scotland in the Scots language, as The Guid-Sisters ("guid-sister" being Scots for "sister-in-law"). His work has been translated into many languages, including Yiddish, and including such works as Sainte-Carmen de la Main, Ç'ta ton tour, Laura Cadieux, and Forever Yours, Marilou (À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou).
He has always been openly gay, and he has written many novels (The Duchess and the Commoner, La nuit des princes charmants) and plays (Hosanna, La duchesse de Langeais) centred on gay characters. In a 1987 interview with Shelagh Rogers for CBC Radio's The Arts Tonight, he remarked that he has always avoided behaviours he has considered masculine; for example, he does not smoke and he noted that he was 45 years old and did not know how to drive a car. "I think I am a rare breed," he said. "A homosexual who doesn't like men."
His latest play to receive wide accalaim is For the pleasure of seeing her again, a funny and nostalgic play, centered on the memories of his mother.
He later published the Plateau Mont-Royal Chronicles, a cycle of six novels including The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (La grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte, 1978) and The Duchess and the Commoner (La duchesse et le roturier, 1982).
The second novel of this series, Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel (Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges, 1980), was one of the novels chosen for inclusion in the French version of Canada Reads, Le combat des livres, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2005, where it was championed by union activist Monique Simard.
Tremblay is currently working on a television series entitled Le Cœur découvert ("The Open Heart"), about the lives of a gay couple in Quebec, for the French-language TV network Radio-Canada.
He recently completed a new cycle of books, the Cahiers (Cahier noir, Cahier Rouge, Cahier Bleu), reflecting the changes happening in 1960s Montreal during the Quiet Revolution.
Tremblay refused the Order of Canada in 1990, and in 1991 was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec.
In April of 2006 he declared that he no longer believed in the separation of Quebec. But he clarified his thoughts some time later by saying he was still a supporter of Quebec sovereignty, though critical of the actual state of the debate, which in his opinion was too much focused on economic issues. In reponse to this, the columnist Marc Cassivi of La Presse wrote that "there was only one closet a Quebec artist could never exit and that was the federalist one." Template:Ref
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Works about Tremblay
- Renate Usmiani, Michel Tremblay. Douglas and McIntyre, 1982, ISBN 0295958634
- Gilbert David and Pierre Lavoie, eds., Le Monde de Michel Tremblay. Cahiers de Théâtre JEU/Éditions Lansman, 1993.
- Craig Walker, "Michel Tremblay: Existential Mythopoeia," The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition. McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, ISBN B0008IQX3M