Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body

Almost twenty years after its first production, Michel Tremblay's two- person play about a drag queen and her motorcyclist lover, Hosanna, was staged again in Montreal, this time by a woman director, Lorraine Pintal. In the interval, the play had become a classic of Québec nationalism, with the sexual disguises read as failure of political self-affirmation. The new produc- tion was significantly different from the 1973 production, which many people in the audience remembered. Most striking of the changes was an alteration in the ending when the drag queen Claude, or Hosanna, no longer undresses to reveal her "true self." As Renate Usmiani rather sententiously described the ending in her account of the early version, "both characters realize that the time for hiding places and disguises is past and they must assume real life and real identities" (96). Even if it originates in Tremblay's own accounts of the play, the notion of "real identities," would seem hard to sustain in 1991, especially when it is accompanied, as it is in Hosanna, by a claim to masculinity; Hosanna's five-time repeated final words of the play, as she "becomes" Claude again, "Chus t'un homme ["I'm a man."—author's translation]" (75), words that echo and make explicit the end of the first act, when Hosanna declares to her lover Cuirette, "Moé aussi j'arais envie de t'enculer! ["Me too, I want to fuck you."—author's translation]" (48)

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• Love & death in the American novel

  Leslie A Fiedler•Love & death in the American novel•1992

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