En Pièces Détachées is Michel Tremblay’s look at “The Main” in Montreal. The play concerns Hélène, a waitress who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street. She is married to Henri, who sits around all day watching Captain Cartoons on television. They live in a tenement in the East End with their daughter, Francine, and Hélène’s mother, Robertine. During the course of the play, Hélène’s retarded brother, Claude, who has been “sent away” and who wears “sunglasses and speaks English” as his passport to the world, runs away from the brothers at the sanitorium and returns home for a little visit.

En Pièces Détachées was first performed in Montreal in 1969. It was broadcast over French language CBC-TV in 1971 and 1972, drawing the largest audience in Quebec for a televised dramatization of a play.

Cast of four women and two men.