About the Play:

Winner 2013 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Drama

Tom at the Farm (English-language version of Tom à la ferme) is a full-length drama by Michel Marc Bouchard translated by Linda Gaboriau. Tom is a young advertising man whose male colleague and lover has died in an accident. The dead man grew up on a farm, miles from anywhere. Tom makes the trek there for the funeral, and finds a religious family who know nothing of his existence. Tom at the Farm blends psychological-thriller elements as it moves toward an unsettling plunge into a nightmare of fear, intolerance and fantasy.

Tom at the Farm unfolds with blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, truth and fiction. Following the accidental death of his lover, and in the throes of his grief, urban ad executive Tom travels to the country to attend the funeral and to meet his mother-in-law, Agatha, and her son, Francis – neither of whom know Tom even exists. Arriving at the remote rural farm, and immediately drawn into the dysfunction of the family's relationships, Tom is blindsided by his lost partner's legacy of untruth. With the mother expecting a chain-smoking girlfriend, and the older brother hellbent on preserving a facade of normality, Tom is coerced into joining the duplicity until, at last, he confronts the torment that drove his lover to live in the shadows of deceit. The lover – the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man – has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival. In this same rural setting, one young man had once destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy, years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom. In a play that unfolds with progressively blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, between truth and elaborate fiction, Michel Marc Bouchard dramatizes how gay men often must learn to lie before they learn how to love.

Tom à la ferme premiered in 2011 at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui and has been presented in France and was adapted for the screen n 2013,by award-winning Quebecois director Xavier Dolan. Tom at the Farm had its English-language premiere in 2015 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto and won the Toronto Theatre Critics' Award for best new Canadian play. Since then the play has been produced at professional theatres across Canada and in the US.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Michel Marc Bouchard's Tom At The Farm is a big ol' slice of Quebec-style gothic, complete with a funeral, bloody animals and a wildly dysfunctional family with lots of skeletons in its closets." — NOW Toronto

"It's taut, it's tense, it's terrifying – and it's terrific." — Positive Lite

"Extremely well written, a work of great density." — CBC

"Funny, harsh, tender, and terrible, the play engages us in a twisted game that plays itself in a rural setting where innocence and boiling anger collide." — Montreal Sun

About the Playwright:

Michel Marc Bouchard is one of Québec's most prominent playwrights. He has written more than 20 plays, six of which have been adapted for film. His works, translated into many languages, are regularly performed around the world. He has received numerous grants and garnered many awards including the Dora Mavor Moore Award and Chalmers Award (Toronto), National Arts Centre Award, Betty Mitchell Award (Calgary), Prix du Journal de Montréal, Primo Candoni (Italy), SACD (France) and awards from critics' associations in several countries. He received four nominations for the Governor General's Award for literature (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize).

About the Translator:

Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montréal. Her translations of plays by Quebec's most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has twice won the Governor General's Award for Translation: in 1996, for Daniel Danis' Stone and Ashes, and in 2010, for Wajdi Mouawad's Forests.