Un Jacques Cartier errant : trois pièces

Un Jacques Cartier errant : trois pièces

Jacques Cartier Discovers America: Three Plays

Grégoire Chabot’s triple collection sits English and French texts face-to-face in a small variety of dramatics and family humor, where characters carry in tow a heavy load of self-pity, but where comedic endings refuse to resign any one of Chabot’s dopes to the hellish literary annals of inevitable suffering. The title play of the collection brings sixteenth-century French explorer Jacques Cartier to a nearly empty Franco-American pour-house in a modern mill town, only for the distinguished and costumed guest to find himself in New England – not New France. Chabot’s second, 'Chere Maman,' shows us a family of bickering, adult-age children uniting around the 10th anniversary of Maman’s death and the 21st birthday of their lone niece, watching family change by the not so dissimilar courses of death and growth. 'Sans Atout,' the third and final piece, places a television at the center of an elderly Franco American couple’s Thanksgiving Eve and Day, channeling onto stage not only the burdens that alcohol consumption can place on relationships (or vice versa), but the disconcerting effects of modernity on a family steeped in holiday tradition. All three plays toy heartwarmingly with a barrage of linguistic idiosyncrasies, the sentiments of which are familiar to the many literatures that concern family life in post-immigrant Americana. With a gift for wordplay, Chabot is able to exaggerate smartly the New England French stereotypes about sports, drinking, family, work, and religion to the point that exceeds ridiculousness and becomes – for better or for worse – entirely familiar.

Chabot, Grégoire

University of Maine Press

1996

Français and English

Book

No

9781595266934

291

Orono, Maine