Sameness and difference in Les Belles-surs: A Canadian spectator's reflections on two Polish productions of Michel Tremblay's play
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The viewing of two Polish productions of Qubcois playwright Michel Tremblay's play Les Belles-surs gives rise to a reflection on the ways in which foreign reception can change theatrical works, both through translation into another language and through the physical othering of performance and staging. At the heart of Tremblay's play, in which a million trading stamps bring a fleeting vision of material happiness to a Montreal working-class housewife and send a gathering of other women into paroxysms of jealousy, is condensed a particular experience of poverty and a lived relationship between that poverty and consumerism. These very different Polish productions, occurring seven years apart, at different moments in the post-Communist era, represent two diverse attempts to imagine not only a more or less distant, more or less understood North American socio-cultural phenomenon, but also the impact of emerging consumerism in a rapidly changing Polish society. In the imagining of the other is implied a re-imagining of self. For the Canadian spectator, the experience of viewing these two productions, comparing them and reflecting on them over an extended period of time, has yielded insights into an evolving feat of cross-cultural imagining, as well as a heightened awareness of the consumerism at the centre of the belles-surs' universe, a new appreciation of the power of Tremblay's stamps to signify.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".