Michel and Ti-Jean

By George Rideout

In this probing character study, Rideout fashions a hypothetical 1969 meeting in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, between Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay and an individual whom he believes to be a truly great writer – beat generation author Jack Kerouac, whose Francophone mother affectionately called him Ti-Jean. At the time of their meeting, Kerouac is forty-seven years old and only months away from death, destroyed by drink in an attempt to live up to the wild image of the “beatnik” stereotype he coined in his novel On the Road. Michel Tremblay is twenty-seven and his first widely produced play, Les Belles Soeurs, has premiered a year before.

As he encounters his writing idol, the younger man must break through the older man’s emotional barriers to establish common ground. Ultimately, Kerouac’s Québécois background helps Tremblay understand his work, recognize the role religion takes, and the place women play in his psyche, as stated metaphorically in the various female characters who populate Les Belles Soeurs.

Cast of 2 men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889229037

George Rideout

George Rideout was raised in Texas and moved to Canada in his teens. He now teaches theatre at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, where the annual New Plays Festival presents one-act plays written in his playwriting class. His own work as a playwright is more widely celebrated, winning numerous regional and national playwriting awards. His plays often reflect on cross-cultural relationships, particularly as they exist in times of great social change. They include Texas Boy (which has had more than thirty different productions), The Longstreth Line, Walking on the Moon, 689 Spadina Ave., The Austin Texas Twist Championship, The Tall Girl_, and An Anglophone Is Coming to Dinner.

Book preview

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Contents

Preface

Michel and Ti-Jean

Act One

Act Two

Acknowledgements

George Rideout

To my sister, Margaret Bard

Preface

When Roy Surette, the artistic director of the Centaur Theatre, asked me to read this play, he said: Tremblay, Kerouac, a pool table, let me know what you think. He did not mention that it would lead me into a big adventure and a renewed love of literature in all its forms.

A young man walks into a bar. He meets another man. They talk. It is 1969 in Florida; it’s the same year in Montreal – everything is about to explode. The young man is on his way to the top; the old man is finding new contours to hitting bottom. The young man seeks approbation from his elder; the old man seeks absolution from the younger. Neither can be sated. The young man is twenty-seven; the old man is forty-seven. A night of hard truths lies in wait.

I approached my first read of Michel and Ti-Jean with the notion that I knew something about these two men. Prior to reading George Rideout’s masterful play, I was anxious about the potentially biopic sensibility: a concern that was speedily silenced. Instead, while reading I was taken in by the real-ness of its unfolding – the writing was so effortless, the situation so uncharacteristically unadorned: a fictional encounter that presents like a hidden-camera account of an actual conversation.

Coming out the other side of my first read, I realized that the ease in reading had everything to do with being completely transported into a bar to which I had never been and into a conversation to which I would otherwise have not been granted access. Rideout offers up a complete suspension of disbelief, a total ride to the other side, and a gloriously intimate night with two men who changed our world. Inaccessible giants of literature transform into astonishing true-to-life characters. The play invites us in, it places us on the other side of the confessional window, and the characters appear to whisper: We do this for you, all we ever did, all we will ever do, will be for you. It’s hard not to imagine their real-life counterparts sharing this sentiment.

A pool table, two tables, four chairs, a plastic plant. Real time. Real liquid. Real food. Real pool. Oh, and a full-on jazz band if you follow George’s stage directions, which I suggest you do. The brilliance of this play is how – at every turn – it heightens what might actually have happened to allow us to feel that it actually is happening. How else to explain the extraordinary jazz riff on Les Belles-Soeurs, or being guided up to Kerouac’s heaven? How else to explain Kerouac’s ability to conjure Tremblay’s recently deceased mum for him and for us?

In this play Kerouac says: All I ever wanted to be was an artful storyteller.

Cut to opening night and the run of this staggeringly successful show. Alain Goulem (as Jack Kerouac) and Vincent Hoss-Desmarais (as Michel Tremblay) channelled their muses. They both offered inspired interpretations. These actors become the men they sought to create and everyone in the audience responded to this feat in kind. Ever been in an audience where the seats – en masse – seem to tilt forward toward the stage? Where it feels like the audience is spurring the storytellers on, asking them to give more, to go further? Where the audience is using the action to mirror its own sense of self? This play does that. It is electric. Michel and Ti-Jean unearths the secret space between language as we hear it, and the power that hides within its folds. Caught between English, French, and First Nations heritage, these characters tell Canadians a story of our becoming, of our terrific future(s), and of our heartbreaking pasts.

These two men are so emblematic of a shared time and place, yet are situated on different sides of the border – Kerouac: American, and on his way out; Tremblay: Québécois and on his way in. Kerouac, a maker of the most dazzling sound movies and a voice of America, and Tremblay, the maker of the most marvellous choral conjurings and a voice for his nation, meet in the middle over a shared love of cartoons and mothers and, most formidably, literature.

The fact that both men share the same heritage and that both men ended up spending huge amounts of time in Florida was for me – a hitherto Florida avoider – part of a beguiling mystery. In preparation for this show I set out on a trip to trace steps, to find Kerouac in St. Petersburg, and to see what I could find at the end of the line (Jack Kerouac died there in 1969). Florida remains a mystery but I have since added my own steps to an annual pilgrimage there.

The characters in this play understand desire. Or perhaps more pertinent than understanding it, they are both cursed and graced with it. There is perhaps no better place for a drama to unfold than at the crossroads of what could have been and what is to be. To witness the poetry of pain that resides at this spot is the makings of a great night of theatre.

Welcome to one of the most exciting two-handers in Canada. Welcome to George Rideout’s Michel and Ti-Jean. I consider you lucky to have landed on these pages. I envy your discovery, as you fall under the spell of these three literary lions: Jack Kerouac, Michel Tremblay, and George Rideout conjoined by a love of words. I cannot wait until the next director picks this up and watches it take flight.

Roy Surette asked me to let him know what I thought. I