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Les Belles Soeurs
Les Belles Soeurs
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Author: Michel Tremblay Translated by: Bill Glassco & John Van Burek Publisher: Talonbooks (cover image may change) Format: Softcover # of Pages: 111 Pub. Date: 1972 ISBN-10: 0889223025 ISBN-13: 9780889223028 Cast Size: 15 female
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About the Play:
Les Belles Soeurs has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.
Les Belles Soeurs
(English-language version) is a full-length comedy by Michel
Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek and Bill
Glassco. A housewife wins a million trading stamps in a lottery.
When she throws a party to get some help pasting her newly-won
savings stamps into books, she unwittingly unleashes a flood of
frustration from other women in the neighbourhood. This social and
political satire is driven home with vicious and bawdy humour in this
Québécois stage classic.
Les Belles Soeurs
is set in an impoverished Montreal neighbourhood in the late 1960s.
Germaine Lauzon has won a million Gold Star trading stamps – given
out by grocery stores and exchanged for goods like BBQs and lawn
chairs. Her head swimming with dreams of refurbishing and
redecorating her working-class home from top to bottom with free
merchandise selections from the catalogue. And she just can't help
gloating about her stroke of fortune. She invites fourteen of her
friends and relatives in the neighbourhood over to help her paste the
stamps into redemption booklets. Raucous, reckless and rude, the
women shamelessly share their most secret hopes and fears, complain
stridently about their friends and relatives, fantasize wistfully
about escaping the misogynist drudgery of their lives, the church,
and their small joys – like Bingo. What Germaine doesn't realize is
that while the women are talking, they are surreptitiously tucking
most of the stamps into their purses and clothing, self-righteously
appropriating what they consider to be Germaine's "illegitimate"
good fortune.
Les Belles Soeurs premiered
in 1968 at Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montréal, Quebec, the same
year that René Lévesque founded the nationalist Parti Québécois,
and became an overnight success. The English version translated by
Bill Glassco and John Van Burek English premiered in 1973 at the St.
Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto. In 2018 it played at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the title The Unmanageable Sisters. The play has become a
favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is the most produced Québecois
play, having been translated into more than 30 languages and
presented in over 25 countries.
Cast: 15 female
What people say:
"This was the play that marked a changing of the guard in Quebec theatre, and maybe even Quebec society. In the play's language, and in his choice of subject matter and characters, Tremblay brought the Quiet Revolution to the stage. He approached the subject of class in an honourable way. His characters were working-class people, they were intelligent, and he deeply respected them." — The Book of Lists
"When a play catches up with
you on the ride home and you can't tell your tears from the rain on
your windshield—well, that's the power of Michel Tremblay's
award-winning script, Les Belles-soeurs … it's easy to understand
why Les Belles-soeurs is Tremblay's most popular and widely
translated play. Almost 50 years later, the text still feels
incendiary and its subject matter groundbreaking." —
Georgia Straight
"Lively and boisterous… an
all-female cast who keep the laughs coming." — Broadway
World
"A tart but human satire on
Canadian life and aspirations." — Vancouver Sun
"Tremblay's Les belles-soeurs
is on all counts a masterpiece… This play cannot be missed, buy a
ticket at any cost and… hang on to your seat!" — Le
Devoir (Montréal)
"Tremblay combines naturalism
with the choral asides which sum up, focus and carry forward the
play. If the details of social hypocrisy and oppression are
parochial, the broad themes are not, and the play remains as fresh
now as then." — Buffalo News
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.
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Bill Glassco & John Van Burek
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Bill Glassco & John Van Burek
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by John Van Burek
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Bill Glassco & John Van Burek
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by John Van Burek
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Linda Gaboriau
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Allan Van Meer
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Sheila Fischman
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Michel Tremblay, Translated by Linda Gaboriau
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