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    The Drivin Force e-book
    The Drivin Force e-book
    The Drivin Force e-book
    Ebook48 pages41 minutes

    The Drivin Force e-book

    By Michel Tremblay

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    About this ebook

    In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues—to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.

    In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer’s ward and it is Alex’s turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son’s contempt for his own working class life.

    With a cruel and disconsolate irony, we come to see that his father’s lifelong attempt to mock and censure Claude’s work as consisting of nothing but mediocre, misrepresentative lies, has been the very driving force behind Claude’s compulsion to continue to reveal the “truth” of human relationships as he so desperately wants his father to understand it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateNov 1, 2005
    ISBN9780889228207
    The Drivin Force e-book
    Author

    Michel Tremblay

    A major figure in Québec literature, Michel Tremblay has built an impressive body of work as a playwright, novelist, translator, and screenwriter. To date Tremblay’s complete works include twenty-nine plays, thirty-one novels, six collections of autobiographical stories, a collection of tales, seven screenplays, forty-six translations and adaptations of works by foreign writers, nine plays and twelve stories printed in diverse publications, an opera libretto, a song cycle, a Symphonic Christmas Tale, and two musicals. His work has won numerous awards and accolades; his plays have been published and translated into forty languages and have garnered critical acclaim in Canada, the United States, and more than fifty countries around the world.

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      Book preview

      The Drivin Force e-book - Michel Tremblay

      Cover-Image

      Contents

      Cover

      First Production Notes

      Characters

      Act One

      Act Two

      Other Books by Michel Tremblay

      Copyright Information

      The Driving Force

      A Play by Michel Tremblay

      Translated by Linda Gaboriau

      Talon_logo_07_4ebooks

      for Wajdi Mouawad,

      who suggested that I revisit the characters of Alex and Claude in Le Vrai Monde?

      First Production Notes

      L’impératif présent was first presented on October 17, 2003 at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal with the following cast and crew:

      ALEX: Jacques Godin

      CLAUDE: Robert Lalonde

      Director: André Brassard

      Set design: Richard Lacroix

      Costume design: Mérédith Caron

      Lighting: Michel Beaulieu

      Assistant Director: Isabelle Brodeur

      Characters

      ALEX, 77

      CLAUDE, 55

      ACT ONE

      ALEX’s room in a home for Alzeimer’s patients.

      ALEX is sitting in a wheelchair.

      CLAUDE, his son, has just finished washing and dressing him and is patting his cheeks with eau de cologne.

      ALEX will remain perfectly still, absent, during the entire act.

      CLAUDE

      You don’t know what this takes out of me, do you? The physical effort … and all the rest … Washing you. Powdering you. Putting on your diaper, your clean pyjamas. Shaving you. Patting your cheeks with cologne. Just to cover up how you’re going to smell in half an hour. So it won’t stink the minute we open the door. To create the illusion that you’re clean for a while.

      He has finished grooming his father. He backs away from the chair and examines his work.

      How long’s it going to take before you start deteriorating again? Your brain has practically stopped working, but your heart goes on pumping like nothing was wrong. You always had a thick head of hair, and a heavy beard. If I weren’t here to shave you … They don’t have the time around here, do they? I mean, they can’t doll you up like I do, they can’t devote the whole afternoon to you, they make it short and sweet, deal with the most pressing stuff, the most urgent, they’ve got other cases, worse cases, the bedridden ones who can’t be moved … They don’t have time to climb into the tub with you to give you more than a sponge bath … They’ll oil your body every night so you don’t get bedsores, but they won’t climb into the tub with you to give you a bath ...

      He leans over his father.

      When that happens to you, when they can’t move you anymore, when that time comes and you can’t get out of your bed, I promise I’ll go on shaving you. And patting your cheeks with cologne.

      Silence.

      It’s called dignity.

      Silence.

      What are you thinking about? You must be thinking about something? I don’t see how someone can stop thinking. Completely. Are you really not aware of anything? Not so long ago, you used to look at me with, I don’t know, let’s say a trace of intensity. You followed me around the room with your eyes. You didn’t know who I was, but I was there, you saw me, and your eyes followed me. Now when I walk by you, you don’t even blink. You look like an old, grouchy baby. Are you blind? Has your brain stopped sending messages to your eyes? Has it stopped telling your eyes that they should close once in a while, to lubricate them? When we put those drops in your eyes, can you feel them overflow and run

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