Gabrielle Chapdelaine is a playwright, screenwriter and translator living in Montreal, Canada. She graduated from the dramatic writing program at the National Theater School of Canada in 2017. Her other dramatic works include Retirement (read in its English version at the Montreal Playwright's Workshop, 2019). She was a screenwriter for Les Invisibles, the Quebec adaptation of the French television series dix per cent. She has also translated several works including Zahgidiwin / Amour by Frances Koncan for the 2019 Festival of the Never-Before.
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Fun facts:
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As seen in a day, Chapdelaine often writes in lowercase. Even in her own bio!
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She loves houseplants and believes in their secret lives:
“Paradoxically, I find some comfort in not knowing the instructions for use of everything I live with. It takes something that we don't often ask for: instinct. And then, I tell myself that it cannot be so difficult to make a living being continue to exist. After all, I do it every day with myself.”​
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Chapdelaine was inspired to write a day because of this quote:
about the playwright
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This quote is from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, a collection of essays about daily routines and choosing presence over productivity. (Full passage below) Annie Dillard is an author best known for her narrative prose and meditative essays on the natural world. A Point Breeze native, a lot of her work draws inspiration from the Pittsburgh landscape. Her memoir, An American Childhood, focuses on her experience growing up in Pittsburgh.
“how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
a day has had two professional productions. It premiered in French at the Monument-National in February 2018, starring the playwright’s former classmates from the National Theater School of Canada. It received the 2018 Gratien-Gélinas Prize for Best New Play. In August, the Center for Dramatic Authors (CEAD) produced a reading of a day as part of Dramaturgies en Dialogue, a Canadian new play festival. In an interview, the playwright talked about what the play means to her. The video is in Québécois French, but we translated it below!
translated transcript of interview:
"I don’t know how many times in life it seems like we wake up in the morning and say “I think today is a game of getting up” and we’re just not feeling it, but, at the same time, if we stay home all day then we just do nothing but spend the day the way I do, eating cheese in bed. But all of our usual worries still remain. Those times showed me that I wanted - I needed - to know that taking a break from everything was something maybe possible. It can worry me – worrying whether or not it is okay to do nothing – whether anything will be okay at all. The form of the play fits naturally to this feeling.
The form follows the hours of the day. In fact, each hour that comes back around the next day is a new event. So, the hours dictate everything. I have a lot of fun with this formula. After that it’s very simple, it has a natural plot ending.
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For my best writing, I really like to listen to Whitney Houston. I don’t know, there’s something so emotionally investing in her music. It makes me want to stop doing things and just write. I can’t do things halfway while listening to Whitney.
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Yes, I received the honor of the Grand Prize. I’m very lucky, very happy, very honored. It was exciting when I saw the first reading to see the way the text would reach the audience. I had to sit back in the reading and listen for the ‘traps’ because there are plenty of little challenges to reading the play. It is full of little challenges, like Dante. It has several narrative processes. It’s full of characters who play different levels of ‘the game’ [of life] to see how they're going to cope with it.
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The impact that I want a day to have on the audience is… I created the piece having in mind a quote by Annie Dillard that I like a lot. It’s “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” That quote, for me, is fantastic because, in one way, our lives are really flat and we spend our days doing nothing. Your day was “too bad,” that’s your opinion. Then, at the same time, there’s something so miraculous and special about it all and the view that it’s basically “your life.” It’s this opinion that everyday life is beautiful – even if it’s flat, even if we get bored, even if it’s the anti; it is what it is. If this is correct and if this is life, [then] it’s not at all far-fetched or fairy tales. It's true that I would like some kind of relief for my existential dread. I would like that. I think that is what the audience gets a glimpse of while experiencing a day."
A recent production:
In November 2020, the Cherry Artists' Collective presented the English-language premiere at the State Theatre of Ithaca. This production was streamed for a remote audience, but the actors performed quasi-together, each in a multi-camera green-screen booth. It was featured in The Observer as one of "The Best Zoom Plays, Audio Dramas and Livestream Theater of Fall 2020."
“We long for the grandiose when the highlight of our day is often something like a slow cooker minestrone soup. Our self-sabotages are so daily that they become harmless. We cherish them, almost, because they protect us. What is this thing in us that prompts us to act? It was with this question in mind that I wrote the play.”
- Gabrielle Chapdelaine, Game, Theater review, August 13, 2018