Steve Jodoin, artistic director of L’UniThéâtre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I’m pretty stoked!” declares Steve Jodoin, the (perfectly bilingual) new artistic director of L’UniThéâtre, Edmonton’s only professional francophone theatre company.

In these post-pandemic times he has the sense that the venerable company has emerged into the light. “We disappeared for a bit. We just want to get back on the map.” To that end Jodoin has assembled a new leadership team, with fellow actor and long-time friend Mireille Moquin as administrative director. And this week, in addition to a new website, Jodoin has unveiled his first full season of shows, all four with national connections (and contemporary resonances for anglophone audiences too).

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The season-opener, Michel(le) is a solo show created and performed by Joey Lespérance, and inspired by the real-life story of the actor and his “bro-sister.” The Vancouver-based actor/playwright, familiar to L’UniThéâtre audiences, was most recently seen here as Pierre Trudeau in Darrin Hagen’s The Empress and the Prime Minister, which premiered at Theatre Network in 2019.

As kids Joey and Michel played together. And they escaped their environment in ‘60s and ‘70s Quebec by finding their way to artistic paths on opposite sides of the country — the former into an acting career in Vancouver, the latter into the Montreal drag scene. Tragically, Michel’s dreams of finding a new and truer identity as Michelle were never realized. Jodoin, who was struck hard by “the generosity and honesty of the play” describes it as “Joey’s love letter, homage, to his bro-sister. A very moving story….”

Michel(le), a production by Vancouver’s Théâtre La Seizième, runs Oct. 26 to 28 at La Cité francophone.

Lespérance and Jodoin have a long history as actors. “Our first time onstage together was in 2005, Kenneth Brown’s Cowboy Poetré,” recalls Jodoin. Originally from Quebec City, he came west for a year, to Jasper, to learn English, and never left. He ended up at Grant MacEwan in 2002, in the time of theatre arts program founder Tim Ryan and Brown. Professional gigs, in both French and English, were immediate.  “I missed grad in 2004 to do a show with L’UniThéâtre.” After that came a “western life documentary series,” in which he played an innocent from the city learning western culture. “I felt very connected,” Jodoin laughs.

Jodoin’s season, New Perspectives, includes a musical, unusual in itself for L’UniThéâtre,. The origins of Vaches The Musical, by Stéphane Guertin and Olivier Nadon, are to be found, loosely, in the news: it’s “freely inspired” by a true story, the dramatic Quebec ice storm of 1998. The farmer protagonist Jean is up against it — the mayor, the military, the elements — as he tries to save hundreds of cows from certain death.

It has “a light touch,” says Jodoin of Vaches. “Funny and touching, comedy with heart, about community, family, standing tall against adversity … a beautiful show.” The five-actor production, from Ottawa’s Créations In Vivo, runs March 21 to 23.

Jodoin himself is in the cast of Claudia Dey’s Trout Stanley (May 9 to 12), the play’s first French incarnation (translation by Manon St-Jules), with two actors from Quebec City’s Théâtre Niveau Parking, L’UniThéâtre’s co-producer.

The play, which has an eccentric, not to say weird,  gothic charm about it, is set in a remote B.C. town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley, where two orphaned twin sisters (who used to be triplets) on the eve of the big 3-oh, are awaiting the bad news that invariably attends on their birthdays. A stripper, who’s the town Scrabble champ, has gone missing. And the arrival of a mysterious, possibly sinister drifter changes the dynamic, as a love triangle emerges.

L’UniThéâtre’s touring show for the season is “an adventure story” that obliquely invites conversations about grief. The Théâtre La Seizième production of Anaïs Pellin’s La Befana alights in schools in B.C. and Alberta May 21 to June 14.

All L’UniThéâtre productions come with English surtitles. Subscriptions and tickets for the 2023-2024 season are available at lunitheatre.ca.