PL AYBILL YOURS FOREVER, MARIE-LOU
YOURS FOREVER, MARIE-LOU MICHEL TREMBLAY TRANSLATED BY LINDA GABORIAU }{
approximate running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. there will be no intermission
ARTIST NOTE: DIANA LEBLANC In 1970, Michel Tremblay attended a concert at Lincoln Center in New York, where he heard a Brahms quartet. He returned to his room at The Chelsea Hotel and, in 11 days, wrote À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou. A masterpiece. Its intricate musicality and the interplay of voices create a tragedy with universal resonance out of one Québec family’s despair. The delicate balance between the domestic situation, and the transcendence achieved by the author’s revolutionary use of “joual” a mispronunciation of the word “cheval” which means horse, is breathtaking. Joual is the colloquial French spoken in some parts of Québec, and a challenge to capture in another language, as you can imagine. Linda Gaboriau’s translation is finely tuned and in tune. It captures the spare elegance of the original and does justice to its sophisticated dramatic structure and its vitriolic attack on the family. “I want to put a bomb in the family cell,” said Tremblay. This play is not about two solitudes, it is about four solitudes.
I wanted actors who were familiar with the pulse, the heartbeat, of this oddly poetic language. I wanted a look that revealed the genesis of that catastrophic Saturday morning in 1960, and revealed its consequences in 1971. I wanted sounds that started out vividly real and then blossomed into fragments of memory, longing, nightmare. The English Hit Parade in French, a French play in English... I got all of that, and I thank the colleagues I have been working with. Our rehearsal hall has been a happy place.
Diana Leblanc, Director of Yours Forever, Marie-Lou