About the Play:

Yours Forever, Marie-Lou (English version of À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou) is a full-length drama by Michel Tremblay, translated by Linda Gaboriau. They say hindsight is 20/20. They're not wrong. Ten years after their parents' death in a car accident, now-grown estranged sisters Carmen and Manon are together for one of their rare visits – and one of them is finally ready to confront their shared tragedy. This brilliantly witty, imaginative and perceptive exploration of a chronically dysfunctional family is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of Canadian Drama.

Yours Forever, Marie-Lou is a raw exploration of a fractured family, in which each member grapples with their cultural and sexual identities. Carmen is a boisterous country-and-western singer who has left her home, and all her past, in the dust. Manon lives a more sheltered life, closely aligned with the traditions of religious Quebec, which are now – in the mid-1970s – only beginning to come apart at the seams. Carmen is convinced it's time for Manon to end the years of mourning, while Manon is insulted that Carmen seems to have responded so unfeelingly to such a horror. Each sister has kept the memory of their parents alive in her own way. In fact – here they are, in living memory: Marie-Louise and Lèopold, the girls' parents, appear on stage simultaneously. Just beyond the ken of their daughters, they live out their final day. As the two daughters struggle to reconcile the events preceding the fatal crash, and as their parents play out the culmination of their sodden marriage, we discover there is more to the memory of that fatal day than meets the eye. And yet, can the blame really be laid at the feet of one person? Or can a whole socio-cultural paradigm, which twists its subjects into unbearable contortions and traps them in fear and submission, be at fault?

À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou premiered in French in 1971 at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montréal, Québec. This English translation by Linda Gaboriau of Michel Tremblay's seminal play, Yours Forever, Marie-Lou premiered in 2015 at the Young Centre in Toronto in a production by Soulpepper Theatre Company.

Cast: 3 female, 1 male

What people say:

"...a script that has earned its place in the Canadian theatre canon." — Toronto Star

"...powerful and shocking, not in the sense of breaching taboos but of telling dramatic truths. There's poignance, too, in the one glimpse of former tenderness, as captured in the title, whichever way round you want to phrase it." — National Post

"…a true Canadian classic, with an excellent and authentic new translation by Linda Gaboriau." — Mooney on Theatre

"...the play still fascinates and horrifies as an ugly portrait of a dead-end working-class marriage turned unbearably toxic." — Torontoist

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.