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The Paper Eagle
by Pan Bouyoucas, trans.
Linda Gaboriau
Dimitri, a Greek grocery-store owner in his
fifties, takes to the roof of his Montreal duplex
one day to fly a kite, contemplate the thirty
years he has spent as an immigrant, and take
stock of his life. He is visited by his wife,
his son, his brother, and finally his sexy, young
Quebecois tenant. None of them can provide him
with the answer he so desperately wants, not
the least because he is incapable of finding
the questions he needs to seek it. So he drinks
and makes noise and rebuffs what offers of love
are tendered and ignores the fights he provokes
as the wind rises atop what soon turns into a
Tower of Babel—until his wife Stella decides
to fly her own kite.
“This is the kind of play being done much too
rarely in Quebec… a play in which style comes
a distant second to substance… [Bouyoucas] tells
a small story directly and with great intimacy…
filling the stage with humanity and a surprisingly
deft and manipulative use of language, both as
a cultural barrier and as an all-too-limited
tool of communication even between people who
can understand the words, but not the meaning
behind them…
For an hour-and-a-half a world
and its people are masterfully presented and
the play’s central lesson is extremely well taught,
we often are, in the end, exactly who we say
we are.”
—Theatrum Magazine
“Bouyoucas avoids all the old ethnic and immigrant
clichés… creates characters as powerful and subtle
and moving as the text itself… deftly brings
to light the chasm between immigrant parents
and their Canadian-born children…. You must see
this show, if only to discover the cultural richness
of Montreal.”
—La Presse
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