Playwright Carole Fréchette’s career in theatre has spanned over fifty years, beginning in the early 1970s as co-founder of the Theatre des Cuisines collective, which initially produced feminist plays to celebrate International Women’s Day. Since then, her plays have been produced around the world, translated into over twenty languages, and are published in French by Lémeac/Actes-Sud Papiers, and in English by Playwrights Canada Press. She has also won numerous awards for her dramatic texts, including a Governor General’s award (1995), and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize in playwrighting (2002).

In her plays, she often pits the ordinary human being against the great problems of our day. In her writing and through her characters Carole expresses unabated faith in humanity’s capacity to change the world. Her stories challenge us to look outside ourselves, to leave the comfort of our place as observer and shake off our apathy. And like her characters, invite us and the most ordinary parts of ourselves, to do extraordinary things.

As theatre director Micheline Chevrier has remarked about Carole’s plays – “she makes me believe that the smallest actions and gestures will make ours a better, kinder world. I am irresistibly drawn to her characters who, like me, like most of us, struggle to understand the world in which we live, to find our place in it and to hopefully find a way to contribute in a meaningful way. In Helen’s Necklace, one of the characters says to Helen, ‘We cannot go on living like this,’ a line that then becomes a refrain throughout the rest of the play. I believe Carole wishes to change the world by challenging our indifference and despair.”