In any other country, the awards and accolades garnered by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, novelist, poet and actor Jean Marc Dalpé would put him on the celebrity list. Among his highly acclaimed plays are Le Chien, Eddy, Lucky Lady and Trick or Treat. After studying theatre at the University of Ottawa and graduating from the Conservatoire d’art Dramatique in Quebec City, he co-founded a collective, Théâtre de la Vieille 17, where he worked as a writer and actor for two years. He has co-written five plays and published three books of poetry.
Like other Canadians, this Franco-Ontarian plies his craft in relative obscurity. And, frankly, he’s too busy to notice. His French translation of Sarah Kane’s Blasted is in rehearsal in Montreal, and he will be flying to Sudbury to act in another of his translations, Mansel Robinson’s one-man play Spitting Slag, later this month. Calgarians will have a chance to see his play August (in English translation) this week as part of the playRites festival.
Following some tweaking of the translation after the staged reading last year, August has been thoroughly rehearsed, with the translator and dramaturge Maureen Labonté in attendance. She is co-director with Alberta Theatre Projects’ (ATP) artistic director Bob White of the Banff playRites’ colony. Labonté has worked as senior dramaturge and with literary translators there for several years. She has translated more than 30 plays and was head of the playwriting program at the National Theatre School from 1997 to 2001.
Although Dalpé is himself a facile translator and grew up in a bilingual home, he works from English into French, which he considers his creative and working language. He values Labonté’s suggestions on subtleties of language and characterization and her diligence during rehearsals.
The work concentrates on the nuances of the familial tangles and wrangles of a family gathered to celebrate a wedding during a heat wave. Dalpé’s in-you-face take on how family members connect and collide is told with sharp wit and incisive characterizations. “This project was built on what I hadn’t done,” says Dalpé. “With this one, I gave myself the classical constraint of real time, one setting, one principal action. If that sounds like a constraint, it was very inspiring to me and made me work in one direction. I wanted to go back to the rural setting.”
He also aimed to write a play with only female characters, but says the male characters crept in. “When I started out in French Ontario, it was important to tell our stories because it hadn’t been done very much,” he says. “Though some are the establishment, our people are miners, work in the woods, are working class, so most of the characters are from that background. I’ve consistently gone back to those characters.
“I’m very happy that it is being done in Calgary, because I know that like here [Montreal], the rural roots are not very far [from the surface],” he adds. “It should be interesting to see how the people in Alberta react to that reality.”
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