Cygnet Salon Reveals August Literary Reading, FOR THE PLEASURE OF SEEING HER AGAIN

Cygnet Salon’s August staged literary reading will be For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, by Michel Tremblay. 

A playwright misses his late mother and wants one more chance to have the pleasure of her company. He recalls five different conversations he had with her at different times during his youth, and finally finds a way to repay her. A compelling balance of humor and poignancy, brought to stirring life by Vana O’Brien and Michael Fisher-Welsh. 

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again

By Michel Tremblay; translated from the French by Linda Gaboriau
A Staged Reading produced and directed by Louanne Moldovan

Monday, August 26, 7 pm

At 21ten Theatre
2110 SE 10th Ave, Portland, OR 97214

Tickets $10
The cast:  Michael Fisher-Welsh and Vana O’Brien
 

Playwright/translator/novelist/screenwriter Michel Tremblay is probably the most-produced playwright in Canada and “arguably the most important playwright in the history of the country.”

He was born in 1942 in Montreal, Quebec, where he grew up in the blue-collar neighborhood of Plateau Mont-Royal. Residents typically spoke the joual dialect (the local form of the spoken French of Quebec, sometimes associated with vulgar language) which Tremblay often used in his works. His first professionally produced play, Les Belles-Sœurs, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in 1968. 

“The impact of this work is still being argued in Quebec today, but suffice it to say that it changed much of what was believed to be Quebec culture; language, the form of theatre, which plays should be done at which theatres, the displacing of the Old Guard... It set off a storm of controversy, firstly because of the language (a particularly raucous — some say vulgar —joual), and then because it dared to portray working class women doing working class things...” —Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia 

The first Canadian play about and starring a drag queen was his play Hosanna, which was first performed at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 1973. 

Tremblay’s complete works include twenty-nine plays, thirty-one novels, six collections of autobiographical stories, a collection of tales, seven screenplays, forty-six translations and adaptations of works by foreign writers (including Aristophanes, Paul Zindel, Tennessee Williams, Dario Fo, Chekhov, Gogol, et alia), nine plays and twelve stories printed in diverse publications, an opera libretto, a song cycle, a Symphonic Christmas Tale, and two musicals. 

His work has won numerous awards and accolades; his plays have been published and translated into forty languages and have garnered critical acclaim in Canada, the United States, and more than fifty countries around the world.

 

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