Montreal author David Fennario, whose plays spoke of the working class against a backdrop of marriage between the two solitudes, died this week in hospital, following a long illness. He was 76 years old.
“He was the voice and soul of the working class in the theater,” said Centaur Theater Artistic Director Eda Holmes. In this Old Montreal theater, David Fennario enjoyed enormous success in Quebec and across the country in the early 1980s with his bilingual play Balconville, revived in 2018 at the Centaur, as part of the company’s 50th anniversary.
The creation of Balconville, directed by Guy Sprung, with among others Marc Gélinas and Jean Archambault, caused a shock wave in the theater world at the dawn of the first referendum. “I was attending one of the strongest plays of the decade,” wrote the author and co-artistic director of the Théâtre de Quartier, Louis-Dominique Lavigne, in Le Devoir, in 2020. “Although English-speaking, Fennario became one of my favorite Quebec playwrights. His progressive vision of the world and his own way of translating it into the theater impressed me. His plays Nothing to Lose, On the Job and Balconville remain strong, progressive and exceptionally relevant works. »
The first author in residence at Centaur, Fennario created several texts there over the years, including On the Job, Condoville, and the satire of Quebec sovereignists, The Death of René Lévesque. Fennario’s work was considered innovative at the time, because it depicted another side of the Anglo-Montreal community. Balconville features a group of workers living in the Pointe-Saint-Charles district.
On the CBC website, upon announcing his death, Tom Fennario described his father “as a proud Montrealer who had deep ties to the working class and his neighborhood, Verdun.” In the theatrical world, the playwright was also known for his principles and his activism. In 1980, Fennario picketed with strikers in front of Place des Arts, where his own play was presented, in solidarity with the strikers in a labor dispute.
Pat Donnelly, a former theater critic for The Gazette, met the author in 1975 through mutual friends. The first plays she saw were “a revelation because they reflected the reality of the working class and plays that make us want to spend the night at the pub talking about them”, she told the CBC.
Fennario has twice won the Chalmers Prize (On the Job, in 1976, and Balconville, in 1979). He received the Pauline-Julien prize from the United Steelworkers Union for his play Joe Beef in 1986.
In 2002, the author was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, which attacks the nervous system.