About the Play:

La Maison Suspendue has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

La Maison Suspendue (English version) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victiore and her descendants through her husband and through her true love. It is Victoire's anger at being forced away from the family home and her sorrow at being separated from her dreamy, impractical, fiddle playing brother that fuel the machinery of 80 years of family relationships. A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations in a proud but troubled Québec family.

La Maison Suspendue is a three-generational story set in 1910, 1950 and 1990. The play features characters from other Tremblay works, including his prose, on stage together for the first time – and at the same time. A couple, Jean-Marc and Mathieu, come to spend a summer vacation with Mathieu's son, Sébastien, in a log cabin in the Laurentian Mountains. The cabin has been in Jean-Marc's family for three generations, and when he opens the front door, he takes off on a discovery of his roots. The couple finds that the cabin contains vibrations of fiddler-tale teller Josaphat-leviolon who had a son by his sister, Victoire. In 1950, the home witnesses the trials of Edouard, who fantasizes his ambiguous sexuality while living with his sister, Albertine, from the play Albertine in Five Times, who rejects such fantasies. Jean-Marc, who has had to deal with his own sexual identity, reconciles his identity and his new family with the figures from the past.

La Maison Suspendue had its English-language premiere in 1990 at Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley St. Theatre in Toronto and won the 1990 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award.

Cast: 3 female, 5 male and 1 boy (playing the parts of 3 eleven year old children).

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.