Down Dangerous Passes Road

Fifteen years to the day after the death of their father, three brothers get together and drive out to the place where it happened: an old fishing spot on the river down Dangerous Passes Road. Each sibling is facing a crucial rite of passage: Carl, the youngest, is to be married later in the day and it is this occasion that has brought the three of them together. Ambrose is losing his lover to AIDS. Victor, the eldest, has just left his second failed marriage.

They have never really spoken with each other because they all have their own individual secrets to hide and because they share an ambivalence about the death of their father. Could they have prevented it? Would they have wanted to save the town drunk, dreamer, poet, fisherman, the man who embarrassed them in front of their friends and locked them in the sentimental prison of his poems? Are they ready, finally, to reveal themselves to each other and move on with their lives? Can they survive this unsparing encounter with their own manhood?

In voices that interweave, alternate and play off one another with the exquisite lyricism of chamber music, the brothers reveal themselves as trapped by their father’s inability to let his boys grow up and their own inability to accept him as an adult.

Cast of three men.

AUTHOR

Linda Gaboriau

Linda Gaboriau is a Montreal-based dramaturge and literary translator. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the CBC as well as the Montreal Gazette, and worked in Canadian and Quebecois theatre. Gaboriau has won awards for her translations of more than 100 plays and novels by Quebec writers, including many of the Quebec plays best known to English Canadian audiences. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.