About the Play:

Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic Drama (English-language version of Les feluettes ou La répétition d'un drame romantique) is a full-length drama by Michel Marc Bouchard, translated by Linda Gaboriau. Set against a backdrop of revenge, obsession, and love, Lilies tells the story of Simon Doucet, recently released from prison after serving a 30-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He arranges a private meeting with his former school friend, Jean Bilodeau, now a powerful Bishop. Simon and his friends, all former prison inmates, revisit the harrowing events that occurred during their final year at St. Sebastian's school for boys.

Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic Drama is a play within a play about a tragic gay love triangle in the early 1900s. The central plot concerns two young boys in a Catholic college, in 1912, who fall in love while working on a play about St. Sebastian. Their passion ends in tragedy with one boy sent to prison, the other dead. Years later, in 1952, as the aged inmate Simon Doucet is about to be released, he is visited by his old school friend Bishop Bilodeau, who as a boy was party to the tragic events. The Bishop, however, is imprisoned by Simon and some fellow convicts who act out before him scenes from a play. It is no light entertainment that Bilodeau is forced to watch, but the homoerotic scenes from The Death of San Sebastian, which in turn are revealed to be only a part of the script that is to be presented by the convicts. The prisoners' play takes the action back to the Quebec countryside of 1912 where Simon, Bilodeau and the Parisian newcomer, Count Vallier De Tilly, were young contemporaries involved in a love triangle. In acting out the circumstances that occurred immediately prior to Simon's incarceration, it is intended that Bishop Bilodeau will be the one to confess what he did four decades earlier that resulted in Simon's wrongful imprisonment.

Les feluettes ou La répétition d'un drame romantique premiered in 1987 in Montreal. Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic Drama in English-language translation by Linda Gaboriau premiered in 1991 at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille and won both the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the Chalmers Award for Best Play. It has since been staged across Canada and internationally and continues to be popular to this day, with translations in more than a dozen languages, and adapted into a multiple-Genie-award winning film and an opera.

Cast: 12 male (can be played by 9 male with doubling)

What people say:

"This play is definitely a masterpiece of Québec theatre in the 1980s." — Le Devoir

"The triumphant return of Lilies sends its playwright to the pinnacle of Québec theatre." — Montreal Mirror

"...A wonderful theatrical fantasy, in which the audience's imagination is free to soar for two uninterrupted hours." — Vancouver Sun

"Lilies... is like a torrential rain at the end of a long dry season." — Vancouver Courier

About the Playwright:

Michel Marc Bouchard is one of Québec's most prominent playwrights. Three of his plays have also been adapted for cinema. He has received numerous grants and awards including "Le Prix du Journal de Montréal", "Le Prix des critiques de l'Outaouais", the Dora Mavor Moore Award, the Chalmers Award for Outstanding New Play, and nine Jessie Richardson Awards.