Michel & ti-Jean

Christianne Charette
Radio Canada - 9 mars 2010

Si Tremblay avait croisé Kerouac sur son chemin

George Rideout a imaginé une rencontre entre deux monstres de la littérature francophone d'Amérique, Jack Kerouac et Michel Tremblay. Tous deux sont fils de métis, mais aussi dotés d'un univers créatif très riche. Michel Tremblay, Vincent Hoss-Desmarais, qui l'interprète sur scène, et George Rideout discutent de cette rencontre imaginaire.

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Michel & ti-Jean

15 février 2010 -
Alexandre Vigneault

..."Souhaitons que la pièce trouve son chemin jusqu'à une scène francophone. En attendant, la version originale anglaise présentée au Centaur vaut le détour pour qui s'intéresse à notre littérature et à l'espace imaginaire nord-américain." >>

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 12, 2010 -
Matthew Hays

"The very idea of a two-hander play about a fictional meeting between literary titans Michel Tremblay and Jack Kerouac is imagined is so ludicrous it might actually work. And in George Rideout’s new play, which opened last week at Centaur Theatre in Montreal, it does." ...

..."The action is buoyed by Sarah Garton Stanley’s assured direction and by the performances of Vincent Hoss-Desmarais (as Tremblay) and Alain Goulem (Kerouac), which are perfection. Hoss-Desmarais, having met Tremblay on a couple of occasions, doesn’t just seem to be playing him, but rather channelling him. And Goulem captures the pathos of the declining Kerouac beautifully, without ever becoming maudlin." >>

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 10, 2010 - Byron Toben

"This is a must-see, especially for fellow Kerouac freaks. How can you go wrong with Alain Goulem as Jack in a Sarah Stanley-directed play?"

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Michel & ti-Jean

6 & 7 février 2010 - Odile Tremblay
Le joual et la route
Le Vieux-Montréal, si désert en pleine semaine les soirs d’hiver, abrite le théâtre Centaur, espace de lumière dans la petite rue Saint-François->>

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Michel & ti-Jean

January 31, 2010 - Dave Bronstetter
Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and American writer Jack Kerouac walk into a bar. Sounds like the begining of a good literary joke. It's actually the premise of a play called Michel & ti-Jean by the playwright George Rideout.

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 9, 2010 - Sylvain Ménard

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 6, 2010 - Marianne Ackerman
A Night to Remember
For the record, a young Michel Tremblay never went stateside to track down the legendary beat writer Jack Kerouac, though watching George Rideout’s brilliant new play inspired by What if … you’ll be tempted to believe he did. Michel & ti-Jean’s invitation to suspend disbelief is easy to accept.>>

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 5, 2010 - Pat Donnelly
Review: Michel & ti-Jean
Good theatre, like good teaching, succeeds in evoking a passionate curiosity about something you didn’t think you could ever find remotely interesting.>>

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Michel & ti-Jean

January 28th, 2010 - MJ Stone
Notorious Shared Past
History meets fiction as Tremblay and Kerouac talk poetry and politics in Michel & ti-JeanImagine a bar in Florida in 1969; now imagine notorious Québécois author Michel Tremblay and Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac defying time and meeting each other. Playwright George >>

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Michel & ti-Jean

30 janvier 2010 - Michel Bélair
Kerouac, Tremblay: même combat!
Quelle idée géniale que de faire se rencontrer Jean-Louis Jack Kerouac et Michel Tremblay! Surtout depuis que Le Devoir a révélé que >>

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Michel & ti-Jean

February 4, 2010 - Richard Burnett
Plateau Hero
The rainbow colours of bougainvillea, royal Poinciana and hibiscus blooms and the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of >>

Growing up on the wrong side of town

Michel Tremblay was born on June 25, 1942, on Rue Fabre in Montreal's east end. It was a working class neighbourhood where it wasn't uncommon to have three families living in a single apartment. Tremblay was raised exclusively by women since most of the men were away at war. Being the youngest in an extended family of 12, Tremblay remembered how he would spend hours spying on the women in his life in this CBC TV clip.

Tremblay discovered his passion for writing at an early age. He would rewrite new endings to popular TV shows such as La Famille Plouffe. He was smart and received a scholarship to attend a prestigious school but dropped out after three months. Tremblay later said he was disenchanted with the school's snobbery. He then followed the family trade and became a linotypist.

In 1964 Tremblay won first prize for his play Le Train in a competition for young writers sponsored by Radio-Canada. The play was about two men, a bourgeois and a revolutionary, on a train. The win gave the young playwright the courage to pursue a career in writing.

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Les Belles Soeurs
The impact of this work is still being argued in Quebec today, but suffice it to say that it changed much of what was believed to be Quebec culture; language, the form of theatre, which plays should be done at which theatres, the displacing of the Old Guard... It set off a storm of controversy, firstly because of the language (a particularly raucous — some say vulgar — joual ), and then because it dared to portray working class women doing working class things...
- Canadian Theatare Encyclopedia

Jack Kerouac: Québécois?
On a cold spring evening, a cluster of hipsters, aging hippies, writers, and professors convenes at 680 Park Avenue, scaling the spiral staircase that Michelle Pfeiffer rather more elegantly ascended in the movie version of The Age of Innocence. The century-old mansion once housed the Soviet Mission to the United Nations; today it is the headquarters of the Americas Society, a non-profit body created with Rockefeller money, and dedicated to fostering cultural and political ties between the US and its neighbours in the western hemisphere. Perched on chairs below the ballroom’s glittering chandeliers, the audience listens as Daniel Shapiro, a New York poet and translator who serves as the society’s director of literature, introduces a blue-chip panel speaking on the topic of Jack Kerouac: An Unlikely Franco-American Writer. >>

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50th anniversary of On the Road - Kerouac wanted to write in French
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, Le Devoir's discovery of unpublished manuscripts in New York shows that the writer wished to write in French and had started his most famous novel in his mother tongue!

50 years ago, on September 5, 1957, Jack Kerouac published his famous novel On the Road and became, overnight, the icon writer of his generation. With this sole book, he accomplished the impossible: to create a new literature, spontaneous and dynamic, that would lead to a true social revolution.

Following his example, thousands of Americans hit the roads in a quest for great spaces, freedom and experiences. His characters of Sal Paradise and especially Dean Moriarty announced the sexual liberation and the hippie movement of the Sixties. Kerouac has the gift, rare, to incarnate a generation, to seize it, to speak to it and to push it to put everything in question, to put aside the American model of the post-war period in order to redo everything on new foundations: those of the Beat Generation, of Kerouac the rebel. Here is the adventurous Kerouac that history remembered and that people read. The rebellious Kerouac, beat, and American.>>

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Seguin rencontre Kerouac (in French)

The interview was held in French since the writer is from a French-Canadian family living in Massachusetts. The writer speaks of his childhoood, is love of travel, and his way of writing. Kerouac equally provides his definition of the term "Beat Generation", which translates the misery of the Blacks of the American South, the bliss and the rhythm of Jazz. A movement born towards the middle of the 40's from a meeting between Allen Ginsberg, poet, and William Burroughs, writier. It is Kerouac who invents the term in his description of the rail vagrants - a lost generation - children of the economic crissi of the 30's and Second World War.

On The Road influences a whole generation of young people, precursors of the hippies. Kerouac however refuses the term 'beatnik', which according to him, is pejorative. Beatnik comes after Sputnik, explains the writer during the interview: "They wanted to have the air of the small idealists of America who make independence, to have the air as of Russian spies... Nik, Sputnik, peacenik, beatnik."

At the time of the interview granted to Fernand Seguin, Kerouac is a man corroded by alcohol. He dies two years after, on October 24, 1969, 47 years old, from an ongoing intestinal haemorrhage.

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On the Road is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. While many of the names and details of Kerouac's experiences are changed for the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts. When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance" of Kerouac's generation. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

A popular legend that On the Road was written in three weeks while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan, New York, is apocryphal. It took nine years for the final copy to be published. Kerouac typed the manuscript on what he called "the scroll": a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. Contrary to rumor, Kerouac said he used no stimulants during the brief but productive writing session, other than coffee. Plans to publish the original scroll were announced in 2006; Viking Press published On the Road: The Original Scroll in 2007.

Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On The Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels. These writings are in Quebecois, and predate by a decade the first novels of Michel Tremblay.