About the Play:

Michel and Ti-Jean is a full-length drama by George Rideout. Set in 1969, this two-hander imagines an encounter between Québécois playwright/novelist Michel Tremblay and American author Jack Kerouac, the creator of the dazzling novel On the Road in a bar in Florida. In the play, the two writers share their thoughts on writing, music and religion. Together they discover a shared love of cartoons and mothers and, most formidably, literature, and Kerouac's work becomes more French Canadian through Tremblay's eyes.

Michel and Ti-Jean is set in a Florida bar in 1969. In this probing character study, a young Michel Tremblay decides to hop a bus from Quebec to St. Petersburg to meet an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer, Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. In one corner of the bar sits revolutionary writer and "King of the Beatniks" Jack Kerouac. He's alone, guzzling his beer, sporadically writing in his notebook. Or trying to anyway. In the other corner is bright-eyed 27-year-old Michel Tremblay. The determined young playwright has just made a spectacular debut with Les Belles-soeurs, his play about a group of working-class women in Montréal. As he encounters his writing idol, the younger man must break through the older man's emotional barriers to establish common ground. The two literary heavy-weights spar over the art of writing, inspiration, sports, music, religion and the most innate quality they share: their unique Québécois heritage. Words fly and beer spills in this funny and touching showdown between two legendary French Canadian word-slingers.

Michel and Ti-Jean premiered in 2010 and was a critical success at the venerable Centaur Theatre, the oldest English-language theatre in Montréal. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across Canada.

Cast: 2 male

What people say:

"An unexpected surprise, a daring, novel, audacious idea that actually works on stage." — The Métropolitain

"If it all seems a little retro in the digital 21st century – bus trips, literary legends, wide collared shirts, moustaches, heavy drinking – there's one theme coursing through Michel & Ti-Jean that still resonates. That's the emotional roller-coaster that ensues when a talented, ambitious young person goes for a ride on the fame cycle, and how hard it is when the ride stops." — Calgary Herald

"As a bio-play, this one succeeds marvellously in the tricky art of having famous people tell us about their life and work without awkward exposition. These two go further, spilling out their angst, drawing conclusions, messing up the stage in the sometimes painful, more often joyful process. … Michel & Ti-Jean is one of those landmark cultural events after which Montreal, Quebec will never be the same, a play that redefines how we live together and how that existence, so changed in recent decades, can make great art." — Rover Arts

"At its core, this play is about the granting of permission and forgiveness. Tremblay seeks permission to succeed where Jack, his hero, has failed. … And what he wants most of all is permission to write. What Kerouac wants from Tremblay is more complicated, but it seems to boil down to forgiveness. … Michel and Ti-Jean is not about a man who gave up on himself but, rather, one who is fighting like hell to believe in himself again." — Montreal Review of Books

About the Playwright:

George Rideout was raised in Texas and moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario at the age of sixteen. He lived in several different provinces before settling for good in Québec. He now teaches theatre at Bishop's University, where the annual New Plays Festival presents one-act plays written in his playwriting class. His own work as a playwright is more widely celebrated, winning numerous regional and national playwriting awards.