For the 2009 Tadoussac Playwrights' Residence brochure and testimonials, please click HERE.

Tadoussac: A History

Fall 2002 marked PWM’s first Translation Colony. It took place at Tadoussac, in the family home of director Bill Glassco, with Linda Gaboriau as Colony Dramaturg and Coordinator and seven playwrights and translators with varying degrees of experience. The translators worked on translating Québecois plays into English, and playwrights worked on new English adaptations of classic foreign-language scripts. Director and Russian professor Alexandre Marin attended the colony over two days, to assist those working on new adaptations of Russian works. This Colony was built on the successes of the first Writers Colony in Tadoussac in 2001, made possible through the collaboration of the Centre des Auteurs Dramatiques (CEAD).

Click here to read the 2002 Tadoussac Testimonials

Tadoussac 2007

From September 8-17, 2007, the fourth annual Tadoussac Playwrights' Residence will be taking place at Fletcher Cottage in Tadoussac, Québec.

This year’s residency is a truly Canadian experience, bringing together translators and writers from across the country, from British Columbia to New Brunswick, working in both official languages. This year’s invited artists are: Marie Cadieux, Micheline Chevrier, Peter Hinton, John Mighton, James Fagan Tait, Pierre-Michel Tremblay and Maryse Warda. These seven participants will be translating four different plays and adapting texts as diverse as Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Brecht’s Mother Courage for the Canadian stage.

The projects were:

Coma Unplugged by Pierre-Michel Tremblay, translated by Micheline Chevrier

Daniel Martin, humour columnist for le Journal is plunged into a deep coma after an accident. Or was it an accident? Between reality and dreams, between the various men that he has been and wants to be, in this moment, he is given the opportunity for a true self-assessment and a respite from his cynicism.

Half Life by John Mighton, translated by Maryse Warda

Half Life is the story of two nursing home residents, both in their 80s, meet and fall in love, rekindling what might have been a wartime romance. Had they previously met somewhere else under different circumstances? Why is their love so troubling for their children? Indeed, the light at dusk is sometimes warmer and more enveloping than that of the midday sun. Characters navigate between being and appearance, between cowardice and dissoluteness.

Possible Worlds by John Mighton, translated by Maryse Warda

In Possible Worlds, two lovers experience a baffling series of relationships together, each one just slightly and tantalizingly different, as detectives attempt to discover who is responsible for the murders of a series of intelligent individuals, and removed theirbrains. Possible Worlds was made into a film directed by Robert Lepage in 2000.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, adapted by James Fagan Tait

The Idiot is one of Dostoevsky’s tragic comedies that follows the story of a wise epileptic young man upon his return to St. Petersburgh, Russia after an absence of several years. Guilessly, he quickly befriends people of all classes, all of whom become his rather quick undoing. The novel is one of Dostoyevsky’s most astringent criticisms of civilization in the guise of a comedy of manners.

Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, adapted by Peter Hinton

Written by Bertolt Brecht in 1939, it is one of the many plays that Brecht wrote to counter the rise of facism. The play is set during the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648. It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling, nicknamed "Mother Courage", a wily canteen woman with the Swedish Army who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Swiss Cheese, Eilif, and Katrin, to the same war from which she sought to profit.

Tempting Providence by Robert Chafe, translated by Marie Cadieux

In 1921 Myra Grimsley signed a two-year contract, and boarded a steam ship from London, England to St.John’s, Newfoundland. Her charge: to serve as the sole health care provider for three hundred miles of the sparsely settled coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. By the time her contract ran out two years later, Myra was married to local Angus Bennett, and had given birth to their first child, Grace. Based on the true story of Nurse Myra Bennett, Tempting Providence is a play about duty and sadness, love and change. Four strong characters drive this no-frills drama about a young British nurse who only signed on for 2 years, and the local man for whom she stayed for 70.

Tadoussac 2006

In September of 2006, the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Colony re-emerged, sadly without host and initiator Bill Glassco who succumbed to throat cancer in the fall of 2004. It was his hope and wish that the work started with the first Playwrights’ Residence continue and it is with that spirit in mind and the graciousness of his family that the third installment of the Tadoussac Playwrights’ Colony occurred.

Four playwrights and four translators spent ten glorious days at Fletcher Cottage in Tadoussac, Quebec, under the guidance of Linda Gaboriau. The playwrights and translators immersed themselves in each other’s cultural experiences, shared their expertise and developed new and exciting translated works that will be available to be produced for years to come.

The projects were:

24 Exposures (24 poses) by Serge Boucher, translated/adapted by Shelley Tepperman

On a beautiful August Saturday, in the back yard of a bungalow, a family gathers to celebrate the oldest son’s 40th birthday. The day and evening of storytelling, joking and bickering reveals 8 lives in a family who love all wrong but love each other just the same. Shelley Tepperman reinvents Serge Boucher’s hyper-realist hit, transposing it from a pure laine family in small-town Quebec to a working class Jewish family in the Niagara region.

Public staged reading as part of the 2007 Quebec Scene Festival
Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal, in collaboration with the National Arts Centre
Ottawa, May 2007

http://www.nac-cna.ca/splash.htm
http://www.quebecscene.ca/

recovery by Greg MacArthur, translated by Philippe Ducros

Paranoia is the most contagious germ of them all. Around the world, people are succumbing to the addictive pleasures of a mysterious new substance. Society is threatened. But not to fear, "They" are taking care of everything. A speculative examination of an addicted world and the ramifications of a 500 billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, recovery is a sometimes funny, sometimes horrific tale about the commodification of fear and the oppression of the individual.

Originally commissioned and produced by the National Arts Centre English Theatre
Ottawa, April, 2006
French translation slated for production by The Other Theatre
Montréal, 2008

http://www.othertheatre.com/

The Veil adapted by Shahin Sayadi, based on Khanoom (The Lady) by Masoud Behnoud

Khanoom is a slightly fictionalized account of the exceptional life experiences and survival of a Persian princess, Khanoom. The story is both an epic tale which sweeps through modern history, and an intimate portrait of one woman's journey from an insulated childhood, to a rebellious youth, to a grown woman who must make a place for herself in a world that is entirely different from her own and which is, itself, in constant flux.

Public staged reading
OneLight Theatre
Halifax, November 2006
Slated for production by OneLight Theatre (in collaboration with Neptune Theatre, Mermaid Theatre and Harbourfront Centre)
Halifax, Windsor (NS) & Toronto, Fall 2007

http://www.onelighttheatre.ca/

Bye Bye Baby by Elyse Gasco, translated by Maryse Warda

The story tracks the journey of a young woman, Elle, and her mission to uncover the truth about her birth mother; a quest for redemption and wholeness that swings her like a pendulum between a mysterious past and an uncertain future. In the midst of this, she struggles to make sense of her own life and identity, her complicated relationships with her adoptive mother and her own growing fetus.

Originally commissioned and produced by Imago Theatre
Montréal, November 2004
Remounted as part of Centaur Theatre Company’s 2005-2006 season
Montréal, May 2006
Workshop and reading in front of an invited audience
Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal, in collaboration with Imago Theatre
Montréal, January 2007

http://www.imagotheatre.ca

Conte de la lune by Philippe Soldevila, translated by Leanna Brodie

In the harshly repressive Spain of General Franco, a father (a former inventor of better worlds, now reluctantly recycled into an inventor of things) is reunited with his 10-year-old son, Joan (an inventor of words), whom he hasn't seen in five years. A few days earlier, Joan woke up with an unfamiliar word on his lips: an unknown word, an unimagined, unimaginable word, a word not found in any dictionary, a word whose meaning is . . . yet to be discovered. There is poetry in Joan's words and in his father's inventions, and together they conspire to reveal something profound, unique, something only the imaginary word can decode . . . for all eternity.

Original production by Théâtre des Confettis and Théâtre populaire d’Acadie won the award for Best Production in the category Theatre for Young Audiences at the Soirées des Masques (the annual awards ceremony organized by the Académie Québécoise du Théâtre).
Montréal, December 2006

http://www.theatredesconfettis.ca/2007/index.php

Click here to read the 2006 Tadoussac Testimonials

Click here to see a PDF version of the 2006 Tadoussac Souvenir Brochure.