About the Play:

Saga of the Wet Hens (English-language version of La saga des poules mouillées) is a full-length drama by Jovette Marchessault, translated by Linda Gaboriau. In this play about women's creativity, four Québec women writers meet at the heart of a fabulous vortex, beyond ordinary time and place. Saga of the Wet Hens is the first full-length play by self-taught multidisciplinary artist Jovette Marchessault and a major poetic dramatic literary work.

Saga of the Wet Hens stages a mythical encounter between characters who represent four well-known Québec women writers: Laura Conan (The Ancestress), Germaine Guèvremont (The Islander), Gabrielle Roy (Little Crow), and Anne Hébert (Cloud Dancer). You do not have to be familiar with these writers to appreciate the author's message about women's creativity. Onstage, the women talk and gallop, they sit and rock; they descend from the heavens like angels, they menstruate, they sing; they bake bread, they eat, they say Mass; they trade secrets, recite poetry, share their hopes and fears, their dreams and private terrors; they look into history, decide to collaborate, they write; they become hens, they support and give birth to each other – and to all women everywhere.

La Saga des poules mouillées premiered in 1981 at The Théâtre de Nouveau Monde in Montréal. Saga of Wet Hens received its English-language premiere in 1982 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Cast: 4 women

What people say:

"A celebratory experience for both cast and audience, a presentation of the female condition in both its pain and its exultation, set to rich, poetic music." — Now Magazine (Toronto)

"The Saga of the Wet Hens is one of the most exuberant, engaging, and iconoclastic plays I've seen. I recommend the production." — Broadside (Toronto)

About the Playwright:

Jovette Marchessault (1938-2012) was an award-winning Cree-Québécoise novelist, playwright, and sculptor from Montréal. Self-taught, her poignant work is marked by the harsh realities of her working-class adolescence. Her novels have won the Prix France-Québec, the Grand Prix Littéraire Journal de Montréal, and the Grand Prix Littéraire de la ville de Sherbrooke, and the Governor General's Award. As a visual artist, she had over thirty solo exhibitions of her work in Québec, Toronto, New York, and Brussels. She is also the author of a dozen plays, some of which have also been performed in English in New York, Sherbrooke, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria, as well as in Montréal.