Abstract

As a child growing up in Detroit, I always viewed (English) Canada more as a close, next door neighbour than as a distant, “foreign” country. So when I saw the Théâtre de la Marmaille (now Le Théâtre des Deux Mondes) perform Crying to Laugh at their us debut in my home town in 1984, I felt an immediate closeness. This is what children’s theatre ought to be, I thought, for they had captured the essence of what it means to be a child in an adult culture (see Klein, “Le Théâtre”). The fact that Monique Rioux played Mea (a linguistic play on the word “me”) only added to my feelings of intracultural connectedness, since Rioux is my Québec-born mother’s maiden name. When I visited Montreal for the first time the following year to explore my dormant Québécois roots through theatre, I felt an overwhelming, yet inexplicable, sensation of having arrived “home.” How could this be – moi, the incompetent French-speaking “foreigner” in this “separate and distinct society”?

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