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Balconville
Balconville
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Author: David Fennario Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 121 Pub. Date: 1980 ISBN-10: 0889221456 ISBN-13: 9780889221451 Cast Size: 3 female, 6 male
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About
the Play:
Winner of the 1980 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award
Balconville is a full-length drama by David Fennario.
This award-winning play paints a compelling portrait of life among
Montreal's working class across the French and English language
divide. These quarrelling working-class types – four French
Canadians against four Anglophones – retreat to their balconies to
escape their stuffy flats; hence the play's title. Canada's first
bilingual play, with about a third of the dialogue performed in
French, it has remained a classic.
Balconville is the name one of the characters ironically
gives the working class district where the balconies provide a
dubious refuge from the heat of a Montréal summer. Three families
and Thibault, the neighbourhood drunk, sit on their balconies. It is
election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the
Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets playing the music of
Elvis Presley and making election promises that infuriate the
families and their friends. As a result, we see the English and the
French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment. He later
wrote Banana
Boots, a memoir/performance piece about taking Balconville
to Belfast.
Balconville premiered in 1979 to sell-out crowds at the
venerable Centaur Theatre, the
oldest English-language theatre in Montréal. It won the prestigious Chalmers Award and became an instant classic of the
Canadian theatre performed that same year in Toronto and Ottawa, and
went on to international success at the Old Vic Theatre in London and
the Grand Opera House in Belfast. The play has enjoyed massive
popular and critical success, and has been remounted many times.
Cast: 3 female, 6 male
What people say:
"The bilingual nature of the
drama makes it a great play instead of a good one, but the setting
itself could be anywhere. Balconville is a work
of genius. It's angry, bitter, cruel and funny. It's a real vision of
this country – and even more rare – it's a moment when
bilingualism has found a voice." — Globe and Mail
"When a final analysis is made
of twentieth-century Canadian theatre, the most
significant political playwright will undoubtedly be David
Fennario." — Canadian Book Review
About the Playwright:
David Fennario is an anglophone playwright and a novelist
born David Wiper in Montréal. He grew up and still lives in the
working class district of Verdun-Pointe St. Charles, and zoomed from
obscurity to national fame in 1979 with his play Balconville.
His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob
Dylan song, Pretty Peggy-O. He worked in a number of small
jobs before he enrolled in Dawson College. With his teachers
encouragement, he developed and fine tuned his creative writing
skills. He was the first writer-in-residence at Montréal's Centaur
Theatre, has won the Chalmers award twice, and received the Prix
Pauline Julien from the United Steelworkers' Union.
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