Staging the Act of Writing: Postmodern Theater in Quebec

In the past few years, works such as Anne Legault's O'Neill (1990) and Jean-François Caron's J'écrirai bientôt une pièce sur les nègres (1990) have dramatized the act of writing in ways that suggest a postmodern questioning of dramatic realism, the possibility of objective representation, notions of identity, and role-playing. They employ key metadramatic techniques such as auto-representation, mise en abyme, self-reference, intertextuality, and a mixture of genres. These hybrid texts subvert the realistic tradition of Quebec (and western) theater, erasing the lines that once divided creative writing from critical theory, life from art, characters from actors, players from spectators. They betray the playwright's and the writer/protagonist's desire for authorial control over a text that is exposed as a literary construct.