Class Conscious

Jean-Philippe Pleau’s memoir, Rue Duplessis: Ma petite noirceur, about growing up working-class in Drummondville, Quebec, and joining the middle class in Montreal, had sold 40,000 copies a year ago — an amazing number in Canada. Then, in collaboration with the actor and artistic director David Laurin, he transformed it into a show at Montreal’s Théâtre Duceppe, with an impressive run last fall that helped sell 22,000 more.

The title refers to the street where Pleau spent his childhood, named after the reactionary premier Maurice Duplessis, with a sly reference to the years before 1960 and the Quiet Revolution, known in Quebec as the grande noirceur — the “great darkness.” It is a phrase that has provoked pushback from conservative historians, who point to how much modernization actually happened in the ’40s and ’50s, but it remains evocative. Even for those who argue change had occurred, Rue Duplessis is a reminder that for the working...