Hosanna

By Michel Tremblay; Translated by John Van Burek & Bill Glassco

A transvestite's illusion of herself is shattered when she goes to a costume party dressed up as Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

Hosanna is one of Tremblay’s series of plays set on the Main in Montreal, a world of nightclubs, gay bars, prostitutes, and pimps. It is this “exotic” world of apparent freedom and glamour which attracts several of the characters from "Les Belles-sours" cycle of plays. However, Tremblay also sees the people of the Main as outcasts, living on the fringes of society.

Despite their superficial glamour, they lead desperate lives, unsure of their identities, precarious in their relationships, struggling to survive, just like the Quebecois as a whole in terms of their minority relationship to a predominantly English Canada. They want to be happy, and they want to be somebody.

Hosanna is also a play about a personal relationship and the struggle with strong feelings of love, jealousy, fear of aging and death, but most of all the reluctance to surrender illusions and the resistance to change. It is about the need for communication and understanding, and the attempt to create a meaningful reality is a world apparently devoid of meaning.