Sunday, we went to see the play “Michel and ti-Jean” at the Centaur Theatre. It was pretty awesome – funny, sad, poignant... it had everything a play needed. The Centaur Theatre is an exclusively English theatre, which are apparently a little hard to come by in Montréal. That's not to say that there wasn't a little French in the play, but it was set up in such a way that contextually you could figure out what was going on.
The play itself centers around Michel Tremblay and Jack Kerouac. The two meet at a bar, and the play goes from there – it's about the two's interactions and their styles of writing. It really let me into the ideas behind both of their writings and the style of writing they employed. Some of the best parts showed the influence in the “beatnik” from jazz.
It also had references galore to Kerouac's ancestry and background, revealing his French-Canadian roots. The play also exposed me to another great writer – Michel Tremblay, who revolutionized the theatre world in Québec and influenced the culture. He introduced “joual” dialect to the mainstream culture, showed the real lives of working class women, and attacked religion (something which comes out very strongly in the play was his dislike of Christianity – and Québec was deeply religious at the time).
In any case, the play has been extended to the 13th, so if anyone's up, I suggest going to see it. It was sold out when we went to see it.
Also, my computer has apparently decided, after I pasted the word « Montréal » into the document to make sure I was getting the accent over the « e » correct, that I am now typing in French. Since all the English words are then being underlined as misspelled in this document, I get to see which words are the same in English as in French! It's pretty interesting, haha. Interaction, culture, style, religion... jazz, even. I looked them up to see if they have the same meanings, and they do, of course. That's kind of cool. I knew how closely related the languages were, but it's interesting to see it laid out so blatantly.
In case anyone wants a good French translation site, this one has always been my favorite (it does Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Russian with links to other language dictionaries as well).
Anyways, my accelerated class has finally ended, so that means I'm refreshed and ready for the rest of the semester! Yaaaay!
More to come soon!
