Although Michel Tremblay is best known for his drama, he is also the author of a number of short stories, film scripts, and television plays; in addition, he translated into French Aristophanes’ Lysistrat (411 b.c.e.; Lysistrat, 1837), Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (pr. 1967, pb. 1972) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (pr. 1965, pb. 1971), four short plays by Tennessee Williams, and Dario Fo’s Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare (pr. 1969, pb. 1970; Mistero Buffo: Comic Mysteries, 1983). He has also published a number of novels, including La Grosse Femme d’à côté est enceinte (1978; The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, 1981); Thérèse et Pierrette à l’École des saintes-anges (1980; Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel, 1984); Le Cur découvert (1986; The Heart Laid Bare, 1989; also as Making Room, 1990), and Hotel Bristol: New York, NY (1999). In 1990, Tremblay wrote and published the libretto for an opera, Nelligan, which was produced the same year.

Michel Tremblay is part of a new generation of playwrights that emerged in Quebec during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time of profound political and cultural change for this province. Led by Tremblay, these writers saw as their primary task the liberation of Quebec culture from the shackles of foreign domination. With very few exceptions, the theater of Quebec to the mid-twentieth century had never treated issues genuinely French-Canadian; it was a theater enslaved to the thematic, stylistic, and linguistic control of “mother” France. With the opening of Tremblay’s Les Belles-surs, at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal on August 28, 1968, a new and autonomous Québécois theater was born. Significant partly for its thematic focus on the realities of the working class of Quebec, Les Belles-surs is the first play to be written in the distinctive French of Tremblay’s people—joual. A peculiar mixture of Anglicanisms, Old French, neologisms, and standard French, joual (from the Québécois pronunciation of the French word cheval) is the popular idiom of Quebec and especially of Montreal’s working class. To the French and to Quebec’s cultural elite, joual was a bastard tongue, emphasizing the pitiful nature of Quebec culture. To Tremblay, however, joual was a symbol of identity, a language not to be silenced but to be celebrated for its richness and for its distinctive flavor. To discuss Tremblay’s greatest achievements is thus not simply to focus on the fact that he has become Canada’s leading playwright, that his enormous creative output in the areas of theater, literature, film, and television has won for him international fame, that he has influenced the development of Canadian drama, and that he has won countless awards for his work. Though all of this is true, it is also important to recognize him as a cultural leader with a commitment to articulate and grapple with the problems of an oppressed community.

Tremblay has accumulated a long list of literary prizes and distinctions. Among the most important are his being named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France; his Albertine in Five Times brought him the Chalmers Prize in 1986; in 1988, Tremblay received the Prix Athanase-David for his work as a whole; in 1989, he received the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal for Le Premier Quartier de la lune (The First Quarter of the Moon , 1994), a prose work. Tremblay was named Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec in 1991. In 1994, he was given the Molson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. In 1999, Tremblay received a Governor-General’s Award. A controversy developed when some Quebec nationalists expected him...