About the Play:

Winner 2002 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation

Impromptu on Nuns' Island (English version of L'état des lieux) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay. An opera diva returns from a disastrous engagement in Paris to find her daughter and mother, both actresses, determined to strip away her illusions. Michel Tremblay's Impromptu on Nuns' Island is a multi-layered tour-de-force about art, life, and politics from a matchless writer of tragicomic women.

Impromptu On Nuns' Island brings together three generations of a Québec family of performers. An opera diva, Patricia, (almost fifty) meets her Waterloo singing Salomé at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. In an impromptu get-together in her Nuns' Island penthouse, on the afternoon of her return from Europe, her mother Estelle, a feisty 'grande dame' of the Québec stage (pushing seventy), and her idealistic committed-to-new-work daughter Michelle (pushing 30) goad her: What is the sense of an international career if your art doesn't contribute to change (or at least to wide-spread pleasure and inspiration) in the society you live in? An international opera star lives in hotel rooms around the world, so what is the meaning (and the impact) of her art, and on what, or who's society? Is Patricia right in thinking that in this age of globalization an artist who chooses to stay home is doomed to mediocrity? These questions, this tri-generational drama, are framed by the diva's gay pianist who packs his bags and comes running to accompany her, whenever and wherever she calls.

Impromptu on Nuns' Island premiered in 2002 at the venerable Centaur Theatre, the oldest English-language theatre in Montréal, in a co-production with Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, where it was shown early the next year.

Cast: 3 female, 1 male

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.