About the Play:

En Pièces Détachées (the title was originally the same in both French and English, but was later retitled Like Death Warmed Over) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay, translated by Allan Van Meer. The life of a working-class family in East End Montréal. Hélène is a waitress in a snack bar because she can't make it as a cocktail hostess. The frustrations of her life are matched by those of her good-for-nothing husband, neurotic mother and high-strung daughter. Will they escape? Will they begin to breathe at last?

Like Death Warmed Over concerns a young Montréal waitress and her family. Hélène who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street in East End Montréal. She is married to the always-unemployed Henri who sits around all day watching TV cartoons. They share their East End tenement with their daughter Francine and Hélène's mother Robertine. During the course of the play the family's darkest horse, Hélène's insane brother Claude, escapes the asylum and returns home for a surprise visit.

En Pièces Détachées premiered in 1969 in French at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montréal. It was broadcast over French language CBC-TV in 1971 and 1972, drawing the largest audience in Québec for a televised dramatization of a play. The English-language premiere in 1973 was under the title Like Death Warmed Over at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. The play enjoyed widespread acceptance among leading regional theatres and is regularly performed in college theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Tremblay courageously insists on the relevance and dilemma of neo-colonial French Canada." — Books in Canada

About the Playwright:

Michel Tremblay has been one of Québec's most prominent playwrights since the end of the 1960s. One of the most produced and the most prominent playwrights in the history of Canadian theatre, he has received countless prestigious honours and accolades. His dramatic, literary and autobiographical works, originally written in French, have long enjoyed remarkable international popularity and translations of his plays have received huge success worldwide.