
In Les Belles-soeurs, Germaine (France Perras) clings to the dream of material safety. (Photo by Tim Matheson)
As I was watching this production of Les Belles-soeurs, I kept trying to fill in the holes. There are a lot of them, especially in Act 1.
In Michel Tremblay’s 50-year-old play, Germaine Lauzon has just won a million trading stamps. (Stamps like these were part of an early customer-loyalty scheme: you could redeem booklets of them for prizes.) Germaine figures she has enough stamps to refurnish her run-down house and she has her eye on exotic items such as Chinese velvet paintings and ashtray lamps. But the labour involved in sticking a million stamps into booklets is daunting, so Germaine invites over a gang of her female friends and relatives, who are all at least as poor as she is, to help her out—and, perhaps, so that she can gloat. [Read more…]