The ladies of Michel Tremblay’s epic play, Les Belles-Soeurs, written in 1965 and translated intelligently by John Van Burek and Bill Glassco, rarely hold back, firing off rounds of judgment and scorn at one another with ease. While coming together, and sometimes standing apart. It’s a captivating creation, this famous French Canadian play, one that the French magazine Lire once called a “flagship play“, and thus included in its list of 49 plays in the ideal library of theater from its origins to the present day. In French Canada, and in Canada in general, the play embodies the “inaugural moment of the ‘New Quebec theatre‘”, and here, at the Stratford Festival, it returns, this time to the main stage, to ignite a dialogue of connectivity and jealousy; sisterhood and rivalry; compassion and dismissal. It’s a play I never heard of before this season at Stratford (although my friend insists we did study it in theatre history class at York University about 40 years ago), but one I am grateful to finally be invited in to see.

Set in a working-class apartment in Montreal, designed impeccably by Joanna Yu (Factory Theatre’s acts of faith), Les Belles-Sœurs by Tremblay (Albertine in Five Times; Forever Yours) finds humor in the chaos and sometimes unity of these women. Connected by their “stupid rotten” lives that each of them survive, day in and day out, the play, set in 1965 during ‘la Révolution tranquille’ (the Quiet Revolution) at the end of conservative party leader, Dulessis’ 15-year ‘Great Darkness‘ reign, unpacks a intense social discourse between modernization and secularization, as one era shifts to another. Trapped by the complications and moral attitudes of their Catholic society, these “vulgar women and their spicy Joual dialect corrupting French” (K. Hewitt, program notes), somehow amazingly brought to authentic life even as they speak the lines in English, search for a new balance that sometimes seems firmly out of their reach.

Invited together by Germaine Lauzon, a housewife who has won, and since delivered by “such a man, oh, you would have liked him, Linda!”, a million GoldStar stamps in one of a parade of contests that this pack of women indulges in. “Do I look like someone who won anything?” they say, one after the other, but Germaine, portrayed to perfection by Lucy Peacock (Stratford’s Three Tall Women) has, and she can’t help herself but gloat over all the things this win will allow her to purchase in the company’s catalog. It’s a connecting moment, played out in hair curlers, smoking on the phone while talking to her sister in loud excited tones. She has engaged the women in her life to help her quickly stick the stamps in numerous notebooks, even as she argues with her frustrated daughter, Linda Lauzon, portrayed precisely by Ijeoma Emesowum (Stratford’s Hay Fever) who really doesn’t really want to stay and help with the “stamp sticking party.” She just wants to hang out with her boyfriend, or maybe her girlfriends; Ginette Ménard, played by Tara Sky (Soulpepper’s Where the Blood Mixes), and Lisa Paquette, played by Marissa Orjalo (Tarragon’s Ping) sipping sodas at the corner, talking about their future conquests in this new Quebec order.

Germaine needs these relatives, neighbors, and friends to help her, but it is also a moment for her to lord over and share her joy with all, and as they arrive, one by one, it is clear that this gathering is not going to go as planned. Especially once the first, Marie-Ange Brouillette, played magnificently by Shannon Taylor (Stratford’s I Am William), dressed to frumpy perfection in a housedress dripping in contemptuous rage, costumed magnificently by Michelle Bohn (Coal Mine’s The Nether), stands forth and unpacks her overflowing jealousy quickly and sharply. These women, including her sisters; Rose Ouimet, played powerfully by Seana McKenna (Mirvish/Company Theatre’s Things I Know To Be True), and Gabrielle Jodoin, played true by Jane Luk (“Handmaid’s Tale“), carry a similar burden, weighed down on them by the culture and the time they live in. Marked by religion and their cursed boring lives that lead them to kneel in front of the radio to recite the rosary and end, daily, with television viewing, they are unified in the lot that they find themselves; trapped by their spotlit stories, made powerfully clear courtesy of the stellar lighting design by Louise Guinand (Stratford’s Casey and Diana) and the solid sound design by composer Maddie Bautista (Theatre Passe Muraille’s TOKA). These magnificent beautiful women, each in their own shining moment and way, share a desire for something better, even if they have to do it through the pocketing of stolen stamps.

As the party quickly degenerates, the jealousy of the women escalates, shoving more and more stamp-filled notebooks into their purses, but we also get stolen glances into each of these women’s lives. McKenna’s Rose is the perfect depiction of religion and remorse, denouncing a lazy husband that she cannot say no to when he comes to claim his due. Yet the women, including Des-Neiges Verrette, played by Bola Aiyeola (Stratford’s Hamlet), Yvette Longré, played by Joella Crichton (Stratford’s Wedding Band), and Lisette De Courval, played by Jennifer Villaverde (RMTC’s Top Girls), have no problem damning others, like the wayward Pierrette Guétte Guérin, played tough by Allison Edwards-Crewe (Stratford’s King Lear), sister of Germaine who leads a shameful life working in the club of her boyfriend. This is a step too far, they believe, but the hypocrisy is never so clear as we watch the sister-in-law of Germaine, Thérèse Dubuc, played clear and solid by Irene Poole (Stratford’s Little Women) debase and abuse her wheelchair-bound mother-in-law, Olivine Dubuc, played most wonderfully by Diana Leblanc (Stratford’s Richard III), as the women praise her for her dutiful patience.

As directed with stealth and inventive intelligence by Esther Jun (Soulpepper’s The Promised Land), the trio of young women standing in the rear observing, find their way back into the fold, to fight and confess, just in time for the resurfacing of the nightclub “demon” Pierrette to the great displeasure of some. But it is in Edwards-Crewe’s Pierrette where we find true compassion and engagement, especially as she tries to help guide one of Linda’s troubled friends through a difficult decision, namely to abort or not; a choice that will probably cause her to be ostracized and/or forever trapped in the same construct these older women have consented to be in. These are the moments when the gap between the dark times and the quiet revolution shine forth, when compassion and engagement point out the divide and the complications these magnificent women are faced with inside these old school walls.

But that’s not the only conflict Pierrette’s arrival stirs up. It also shines a bright light on the ‘shameful’ friendship Angéline Sauvé, played tenderly by Akosua Amo-Adem (Stratford’s Much Ado About Nothing) has with both the “demon” rebel, Pierrette, and the steadfast Catholic, Rheauna Bibeau, stoically played by Jamillah Ross (NextStage’s Rumspringa Break). Rheauna, in an act of pure and somewhat cruel hypocrisy, demands Angéline to make a choice, between the happiness and joy she has found in her friendship with Pierette or the judgmental companionship she has with Rheauna. It’s a deeply disturbing but clear-minded conflict and moment in this epic play, dropping them into the painful societal constructs, religious constraints, and complicated sentiments that are at the root of the province’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

Friendships are upset and chasms of regret, disappointment, jealousy, and frustration crack the unity that this cast so magnificently engages with, like the Bingo serenade. It’s clear these women struggle against the expectations of family, friends, and the institutions that surround and rule their bodies and their engagements, but there is a quiet hope falling from the skies.

After an unloading of “crude jokes about nuns, night clubs, and Europeans”; wives hurling insults at husbands unseen, and mothers cursing their own children, Germaine finally discovers the unneighbourly theft of stamps, and the chaos explodes forth a certain clarity to the reckoning and the reality of time and place. It floats down from the heavens, giving us insight into all these silent working-class women, regardless of “how much yelling happens in this play” (E. Jun, director’s notes). Les Belles-Soeurs at the Stratford Festival‘s main Festival Stage, a first for a Canadian play, is a treasure trove of spectacular performances inside a creation that needs to be seen in all its raw sorted authenticity. One that shouldn’t be missed.

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