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Performance featuring acclaimed essayist to focus on Franco-American experience

2 mins read
Grégoire Chabot
Grégoire Chabot

FARMINGTON – Acclaimed essayist and playwright Grégoire Chabot will be joined by fiddler Don Roy for a special performance on Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. at the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine at Farmington.

The performance will draw upon series of monologues about the experience of Franco-Americans in Maine and New England. The monologues book-end the Franco migration out of Canada, beginning with Léo, a Québec farmer who is getting ready to leave his farm to go work in the textile mills in Lewiston.

The second is set 100 years later, as Armand reacts to the disappearance of so much of the infrastructure that supported Francos in New England: the church, the parochial schools and the mills.

Three other monologues focus an everyman character, the sextant/janitor at the local church, who presents his own point of view of the language and cultural maintenance efforts of the elite.

The performance will be in both French and English. Chabot will be accompanied by the music of Franco-American fiddler Roy.

Chabot was born in Waterville, studying at Colby and the Universities of Maine and Massachusetts. He started to write and perform plays on the radio in the 1970s, publishing a collection of plays: Un Jacques Cartier Errant,  Chère Maman and Sans Atout, at the University of Maine Press in 1996. He has written 26 essays entitled, Entre la manie et la phobie and numerous other plays and monologues. For the last few years, he has directed a theatre company, Du monde d’à côté, performing in France, Louisiana, Québec New Brunswick, and New England.

This event is sponsored by the French Club and the Division of Humanities. Everyone, including UMF students and the general public, is welcome to attend.

For more information, contact Sylvie Charron at scharron@maine.edu

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