Balconville by David Fennario
Balconville is Canada's first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and in French, and playing the music of Elvis Presley. The English and the French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment in this award-winning play.Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
David Fennario is an anglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working-class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the center of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a house painter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of the Bob Dylan song Pretty Peggy-O. David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Premier Maurice Duplessis' Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed, and compressed. School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I've been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780889221451 |
| ISBN 10 | 0889221456 |
| Title | Balconville |
| Author | David Fennario |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Talonbooks |
| Year published | 1980-04-03 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| Prizes | Winner of Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award 1980 (Canada) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |