The Desert
By Olivier Sylvestre | Translated by Leanna Brodie
Translated from Le Desert (Quebec, Canada)
A winter night. A man speaks to you, from the other side of the bed. He speaks of a dream he has every night. He speaks to you from the pit in his stomach, the void that fills him. He tells you why he cannot stay. Why he will leave, soon, maybe, tomorrow. Playwright Olivier Sylvestre leads takes the audience into the depths of night. In a free form of musical performance, theatre and spoken word, he invites the audience into an intimate and dizzying dive in the heart of a toxic relationship where you becomes the illusory remedy for a wrong impossible to name. Le Desert premiered at Theatre Prospero (Montreal) January 2017.
Actors: 1 M
Running Length: 1h
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
OLIVIER SYLVESTRE
Olivier Sylvestre is a Montreal based playwright. He is most noted for his first theatrical play La beauté du monde, which won the Prix Gratien-Gélinas and was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General’s Award for French-language drama (2015),[2] and his short story collection Noms fictifs, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction (2018). Sylvestre holds a bachelor’s degree in criminology, and a diploma in playwriting from the National Theatre School of Canada. His monologue Le désert was premiered in January 2018 at Théâtre Prospero in a production by Le Dôme – creations théâtrales, a company Sylvestre co-leads. His play La loi de la gravité, Éditions Passages(s), has won numerous awards in Europe and was translated into English by Bobby Theodore. Other plays have included Guide d’éducation sexuelle pour le nouveau millénaire, and the French translations of Jesse Stong’s You Can Do Whatever You Want and Waawaate Fobister’s Agokwe. His play La loi de la gravité was translated into German Das Gesetz der Schwerkraft by Sonja Finck (Gatineau) and performed at the Theaterfestival Primeur (Saarbrücken) in 2016.
This translation was made possible by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts.
