The 20th edition of Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques (FTA) does right by its name, featuring a curated lineup of 25 theatre and dance productions with roots mostly in the Americas, from Brazil to Haiti to New York and beyond. (A show from Kyrgyzstan is the main exception.)
The festival’s varied programming, combined with its commitment to surtitling all productions in English and French as needed, makes it one of the most vital contemporary performance festivals on the continent, and a valuable meeting place for the Canadian and Quebecois theatre communities.
This year, Intermission presents its most comprehensive FTA coverage ever, with four critics publishing a total of 16 capsule reviews — responses that will appear below over the course of the two-week festival, with new entries added to the top of the post for ease of navigation.
Bon festival !
Querelle de Roberval (Théâtre Jean-Duceppe, May 30 to June 2)
by Liam Donovan
At the centre of this Quebecois drama by director-adaptor Olivier Arteau, based on a Kev Lambert novel that riffs on Genet, lurks Querelle (Philippe Thibault-Denis). Caravaggian lighting by Emile Beauchemin beams through the window of a shipping container in the frigid titular Lac Saint-Jean town, where the 30-something Montreal transplant offers a procession of young men — some underage — their first queer sexual experiences. He bends them over as an 18-wheeler, converted by set designer Amélie Trépanier into an organ, booms Bach.
So begins this two-and-a-half hour production, mostly in French with English surtitles, from Quebec City’s Théâtre du Trident. But the cast numbers 12 and Querelle is only part of the story — Arteau’s script is unrelentingly choral, opening up several sides of the months-long local sawmill strike that is the show’s narrative and political fulcrum. We hear the perspectives of Jezebel (Ariel Charest), a lonely employee; other picketers, from skeptics to firebrands; a young ASMRist (Vincent Paquette) or three; an older Innu man (Marco Collin) struggling to preserve his language; and the mill’s cartoonishly villanish boss, Brian (Hubert Lemire).
Arteau’s direction is metamorphic. Different characters relate to the audience in unique ways (Jezebel’s narration is deeply felt, the ASMRists’ purposefully artificial), and sometimes occupy their own visual worlds (at Brian’s house, Eliot Laprise’s video design cuts to a white void). This mosaic of non-realistic theatrical approaches has its dips in effectiveness — including an overlong climactic battle scene narrated at microphones — but I think it succeeds in making the production feel socially engaged; the play’s contemporary labour politics crackle like wildfire.
Vampyr (Maison Théâtre, May 29 to 31)
by Liuba de Armas
Living somewhere between elegy and ecocritical manifesto, Vampyr is a gripping Spanish-language satirical mockumentary about the social and environmental impact of wind farms in Chile.
Director and playwright Manuela Infante deploys language masterfully, crafting entire scenes with a handful of nonverbal sounds, repeating ambiguous phrases (“ya, bueno”), wordplay (e.g. “impacto” as collision and consequence), and echoing motifs in a nod to the chattering of bat swarms.
Designed by Rocio Hernández, the set recalls the verdant artificiality of green screens and greenwashing. The props are few but strategic, privileging manufactured materials like aluminium and plastic sheeting. Modeling labour transparency, the cast carries out set changes in plain sight.
Actors Marcela Salinas and David Gaete shapeshift as vampire bats, night-shift workers, a company spokesperson, and a chiropterologist. When asked at the talkback on May 30 about the choice to have actors interpret multiple roles, Infante explained: “We’re inhabited by multitudes.” The cast strives to sustain tension between animal and human aspects of their performances. This co-inhabiting of entities anchors the work’s ecocritical stance, culminating with the declaration that man is half-dead, half-living, half-land, half-animal, half-human, “y no solo eso” — “and not only that.” This intentionally paradoxical equation is more concerned with articulating the distinct parts than their sum, to trace kinship between human and non-human life. Vampyr is a challenging work that I think will find resonance anywhere life, human or otherwise, is exploited for profit.
Vampyr will be presented at Festival Carrefour in Quebec City on June 3 and 4.
Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Place des Arts — Cinquième Salle, May 28 to 31)
by Megan Hunt
Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge is a tense recreation of 20th-century history — and reflection on the present — from New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service, that relies on verbatim transcripts of a 1965 debate between the iconic (and iconoclastic) author James Baldwin and the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. Anchored by standout performances from Greig Sarjeant (Baldwin) and Ben Williams (Buckley), the show follows both intellectuals’ arguments about whether the American dream was built through exploitation of its Black population. While both performers depict their characters as articulate and confident, Williams’ performance drips with an infuriating smugness: he’s hard to watch, but impossible to look away from.
John Collins’ straightforward but effective direction centres the inherent weight of the verbatim monologues, and punctuates the historic nature of the debate. That said, the show shines brightest in a standout scene that is, according to program notes, purely imaginative: a conversation between Baldwin and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (April Matthis), a friend who died just a month prior to the debate. Against a sonic backdrop of overpass traffic and Nina Simone wafting from the radio, we get an intimate peek into the interior life of two of the 20th century’s most significant writers. There’s a moment of fourth-wall-breaking within this scene that recontextualizes the whole show as a meta-conversation Elevator Repair Service is having about its own past as a theatre company. It powerfully blurs the lines between today and 1965, arguing that the gap between these two moments isn’t as wide as we’d like to believe.
Festival TransAmériques runs in Montreal until June 10. More information is available here.
Liuba de Armas and Megan Hunt are covering FTA as part of Page Turn, a professional development network for emerging arts writers, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and administered by Neworld Theatre.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liuba de Armas
Liuba de Armas is a working-class arts writer and curator based in Montreal, with roots in Ciudad Nuclear, Cienfuegos, Cuba. She holds a Master’s degree in art history from McGill University and has curated exhibitions at Latitude 53, MSVU Art Gallery, Hermes Gallery, and the Khyber Centre for the Arts. She is one of two co-editors of Beyond the Gallery: An Anthology of Visual Encounters (Laberinto Press, 2021) and is a member of Neworld Theatre’s Page Turn program (2025-27).
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WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto. His Substack newsletter is available at loamdonovan.substack.com.
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WRITTEN BY
Megan Hunt
Megan Hunt is a Montreal-based writer, editor and dramaturge. Her work has been featured in outlets such as This Magazine, Culture Days and IN Magazine, as well as festivals including the Women’s Work Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She is one of the writers selected for the first cohort of Page Turn, a program facilitated by Neworld Theatre to support emerging voices in criticism and arts writing.
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WRITTEN BY
Gus Lederman
Gus Lederman is an emerging playwright and performer. They graduated from OCAD University’s Creative Writing program in May 2025, where they were awarded the Nora E. Vaughan medal for their thesis project, mycomimic. Gus got their start as a theatre critic in the Toronto Fringe’s 2024 New Young Reviewers program. They love campy queer movies and (almost) anything with puppets.
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