About the Play:

Marcel Pursued by the Hounds (English version of Marcel poursuivi par les chiens) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay, translated by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. Both Marcel and his ferociously unforgiving sister Thérèse are hounded by memory, reputation and an unsatisfactory present. Their situation in life has trapped them and they eke out an existence amidst a violent and seedy world of crime and corruption. Marcel Pursued by the Hounds examines how our innocent childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt us in adult life, full of the dangers and realities that were invisible to us as children.

Marcel Pursued by the Hounds is about a boy who has left the fantasy land of youth but had to come back to it because he fears he will be murdered by the Montréal underworld. This play takes the audience back to the world of the first in Tremblay's cycle of novels entitled Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal. The action takes place in 1953 and Marcel (one of the main characters in Tremblay's novel, The First Quarter of the Moon) is 15 years old. His sister, Thérèse (one of the main characters in the novel Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel), has sunken into a morass of alcoholism and is married to a man who has no guts, no pride, and no job. Plagued by hallucinations, Marcel finds little solace in Thérèse's world of cheap nightclubs on The Main. His imagination and, ultimately, madness will provide his only escape. Marcel Pursued by the Hounds is a rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations.

Marcel Pursued by the Hounds had its English-language premiere in 1997 at Factory Theatre in Toronto. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across Canada and has been performed in college and fringe theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 1 adolescent male

What people say:

"Marcel Pursued by the Hounds ... is a riveting, often terrifying, look at two tormented souls that readily suggests the cruel horrors that percolate through the Oresteia trilogy of Greek author Aeschylus, enscribed 2,500 years ago." — The Toronto Star

"Tremblay's grip on matters of the human heart is as precise, knowing and unforgiving as ever." — Quill & Quire

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.