PHOTO ESSAY

Most Valuable Players

Hockey card summaries of this year’s GG Performing Arts Awards winners

By Alec Scott

November 4, 2005

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MARCEL DUBÉ
Dramatist
Born: Montreal, 1930
Claims to fame: One of eight children brought up in Montreal’s east end, Marcel received a classical education from the Jesuits at College Sainte-Marie and was introduced to theatre at their storied Gesu Auditorium. In 1950, he founded La Jeune Scène theatre company. Its production of his play De l'Autre Côté du Mur (From the Other Side of the Wall) swept the 1953 Dominion Drama Festival. Marcel’s gritty plays explored the problems of lower and middle-class Montrealers living through seismic social shifts in the decades after the Second World War; in successive plays, he documented everything from the waning influence of the Catholic Church to the October Crisis. Marcel was one of the first major Quebecois dramatists to chronicle the lives of ordinary people, opening the door for later writers like Michel Tremblay and David Fennario. In addition to writing more than 30 plays (and translating Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman into French), Marcel has scripted more than 20 radio dramas and two television series, La Côte du Sable (The Sandy Coast) and De 9 à 5 (From 9 to 5), which aired in Quebec between 1961 and 1966.
Trivia: Along with René Lévesque, Pierre Trudeau and singer Charles Aznavour, Marcel supported the 1958-59 strike by French Radio-Canada employees, now considered one of the key battles of the Quiet Revolution.
Quotable quote: “The average Joe is as boring as the rain.”