The Paper Eagle
- Publisher
- Playwrights Canada Press
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2006
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887548666
- Publish Date
- Jul 2006
- List Price
- $17.95
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Where to buy it
Out of print
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Description
Dimitri is visited by his wife, his son, his brother, and finally his sexy, young Quebecois tenant. None of them can provide him with the answer he so desperately wants, not the least because he is incapable of finding the questions he needs to seek it. So he drinks and makes noise and rebuffs what offers of love are tendered and ignores the fights he provokes as the wind rises atop what soon turns into a Tower of Babel—until his wife Stella decides to fly her own kite.
About the authors
Pan Bouyoucas came to Canada with his Greek parents in 1963. After studies in architecture, he obtained a BFA in film and theatre at Concordia University and worked a few years as a film critic. Since 1975 he has written in French seven novels, a collection of short stories, a book for children, a dozen radio dramas, and stage plays, many of them translated into several languages. From the Main to Mainstreet (a.k.a. Divided We Stand), which he wrote in English, in 1989 for Montrealâ??s Centaur Theatre, was the best-selling show ever staged at Torontoâ??s Canadian Stage Company. The recipient of many literary awards and nominations in Canada and abroad, Bouyoucas is also a talented translator and the winner of the 2002 Quebec Writers Federation Prize for translation.
Linda Gaboriau is a dramaturge and literary translator renowned for her translations of some 100 plays and novels by some of Quebec's most prominent writers, including many of the Quebec plays best known to English Canadian audiences. After studying French language and literature at McGill University, she freelanced as a journalist for the CBC and the Montreal Gazette. She has worked in Canadian and Québécois theatre and is founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, where she directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. Her third translation of a Wajdi Mouawad play Forests in 2010 won her a second Governor General's Literary Award for translation. Originally from Boston, Linda Gaboriau has been based in Montreal since 1963.
David Homel is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and translator. He is the author of five previous novels, including The Speaking Cure, which won the J.I. Segal Award of the Jewish Public Library, and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Fiction from the Quebec Writer's Federation. He has also written two children's books, including Travels with my Family, which was co-authored with his wife, Canadian children's author Marie-Louise Gay. He has translated several French works, receiving two Governor General's Literary Awards for translation. Homel was born and raised in Chicago and currently resides in Montreal.
Maureen Labonté is a dramaturge, translator and teacher. She has also coordinated a number of play-development programs in theatres and playwrights' centres across the country. In 2006, she was named head of program for the Banff playRites Colony at The Banff Centre. She was dramaturge at the Colony from 2003-2005. She was also literary manager in charge of play development at the Shaw Festival from 2002-2004. Previous to that, she worked at the National Theatre School of Canada (NTSC), first developing and running a pilot directing program and then coordinating the playwrighting program and playwrights' residency. She still teaches at NTSC. She has translated more than thirty Quebec plays into English. Recent translations include: The Bookshop by Marie-Josée Bastien, Everybody's WELLES pour tous by Patrice Dubois, Martin Labreque and The Tailor's Will by Michel Ouellette, Wigwam by Jean-Frédéric Messier and Bienvenue à (une ville dont vous êtes le touriste) by Olivier Choinière.
Editorial Reviews
"This is the kind of play being done much too rarely in Quebec… a play in which style comes a distant second to substance… [Bouyoucas] tells a small story directly and with great intimacy… filling the stage with humanity and a surprisingly deft and manipulative use of language, both as a cultural barrier and as an all-too-limited tool of communication even between people who can understand the words, but not the meaning behind them… For an hour-and-a-half a world and its people are masterfully presented and the play's central lesson is extremely well taught, we often are, in the end, exactly who we say we are." —Theatrum Magazine
"Bouyoucas avoids all the old ethnic and immigrant clichés… creates characters as powerful and subtle and moving as the text itself… deftly brings to light the chasm between immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children…. You must see this show, if only to discover the cultural richness of Montreal." —La Presse
