Christopher Grignard, U of Alberta
The Canadian Hometown Gay Play Project: Michel Marc Bouchard’s Lac St. Jean Via Le Chemin des Passes Dangereuses/ Down Dangerous Passes Road

The gay male playwright’s hometown in contemporary Canadian drama is the primary focus of my doctoral dissertation. Home spaces are centrally important to and within works by some very different Canadian playwrights from David French’s Leaving Home (1972) to Judith Thompson’s Habitat (2001). However, there has been no theoretical attention given to the startling number of plays over the last fifteen years by many of our leading gay male playwrights who have used their hometowns as the setting. In order to correspond with both Congress’ theme on “ideas, identities, and place” and with ACTR’s suggested focus on Francophone topics, I will specifically shed light on Michel Marc Bouchard’s play Down Dangerous Passes Road (2000), and illustrate how I see him constructing a gay hometown. I am intrigued by Michel Marc Bouchard’s foreword to his play that enquires, “Why write about death?” His Lac St. Jean is the site for three brothers’ reunion at the place where they died. The Canadian Hometown Gay Play Project’s central inquiry is this: What theoretical and dramatic approaches lend themselves when gay male playwrights not only write their hometown into a play, but also when they bring death and violence (as Bouchard clearly does) to that space?