Abby Paige Explores Cross-Border Cultural Identities in New Book of Plays

When Abby Paige started writing and performing plays about Vermonters with French Canadian ancestry in 2009, she had no idea how fraught relations would become between the U.S. and Canada.

Tensions began brewing in December, when President Donald Trump suggested he would make Canada the 51st state and insultingly referred to then-prime minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.” In March, the U.S. government announced it would limit Canadians’ access to the Haskell Free Library & Opera House, which straddles the border between Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Québec, and is a long-standing symbol of cooperation between the two countries. And then there’s the ongoing back-and-forth over tariffs, leading to widespread Canadian boycotts of American goods.

Paige, who lived in Montréal for more than a decade and now lives in Burlington, knew she had just the right stories to meet the moment. Her new book, Piecework / Travail à la pièce, published earlier this month, contains two scripts for plays about Franco-American identity and the history of the borderlands between Canada and northern New England. The 50-year-old hopes her work will remind the two countries of their record as friends, not foes.

The first play, Les filles du QUOI? (“Daughters of the WHAT?”), is based on Paige’s experience returning to Canada a century after her great-grandparents left for the U.S. The one-person show intersperses monologues by a ghost and one of the ghost’s descendants, a Franco-American living in present-day New Brunswick.

The second play, Piecework: When We Were French, is also meant to be performed solo. The script consists of 10 monologues featuring Franco-Americans reflecting on their ethnic identity, based on Paige’s interviews with Vermonters of French Canadian heritage. Many of the characters speak about feeling cultural affinity with both sides of the northern border while also not fully belonging in either.

Paige, who works as an executive assistant for the education nonprofit the Rowland Foundation by day, first performed Piecework: When We Were French in 2009 and Les filles du QUOI? in 2022. Now, she is reviving the works for a book tour across New England, including a trio of Vermont dates in the coming month, during which she will perform excerpts from the plays. Fittingly, one appearance will be at the border-straddling Haskell Free Library.

Over coffee at Scout in Burlington, Seven Days spoke with Paige about her work and its resonance with current events.

What inspired you to write about French Canadians living in Vermont?

I had grown up being told that I was French Canadian. I had this sense that that’s what I was, but when somebody was like, “Write about it,” I was like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not that French Canadian.” So I decided doing interviews would be a really good way to learn. The Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury gave me recording equipment, and I started talking to people, asking them about their family histories.

A really interesting pattern developed where everyone said, “Well, I don’t really know anything. I’m not really French Canadian. So you should talk to so-and-so — they’re way more French Canadian than I am.” That emerged as a theme, that people feel like they don’t have a sense of authority about their culture, at least in Vermont. At the time, I was figuring that out, because I was living in French Canada, and my French was really limited. I was getting curious: How are we telling our own stories about who we are?

The plays often switch between French and English, and there’s even a little bit of Spanish. For audience members who only speak one language, is not understanding some of the dialogue part of the point?

Yeah. The work privileges multilingualism, and I wanted to see how people would react to the experience of not understanding. It’s an experience that non-English speakers are pretty used to. But English speakers get really anxious. I was curious to see if I could create an experience in the theater where people would be willing to go along with the feeling of, like, What is going on here? This is weird, and I want to know more.

One of the themes in your work is how language can be a barrier for Americans of French Canadian heritage from feeling connected with their French identity. In that spirit, the book is available in both French and English. Yet in the prologue to the second play, you write about the “awkwardness of presenting French in a text where one of the primary themes is not speaking French.” Can you expand on the tension there?

It’s a unique translation problem where the topic that the people are talking about is not something that you would talk about in the language that you’re translating into. That sort of awkwardness, it’s one of the reasons why I don’t know if the first play in particular would ever be performed in French — because the people are talking about not being able to speak French. I sort of love that idea, though.

Loss of a native tongue over generations can sometimes feel like a deeper cultural loss. How do you think about the balance between assimilation and cultural preservation?

Sometimes things like language get too favored as expressions of culture. Culture is also how we move through the world, how we express ourselves, how we feel our feelings, how we welcome strangers. It’s more subtle cultural norms, and those things, I think, actually persist through assimilation.

Amid growing tensions between the U.S. and Canada, do you see your work resonating in new ways?

Yeah. I say in one of the plays that, growing up here, I had a sense the U.S. was south of me — which doesn’t mean that I didn’t think I was in it. But I still have that sense, that down there is a little bit different from up here.

A lot of us [Vermonters] do look north when we’re thinking about who we are. I think our culture is actually, with the exception of language, a lot more similar to Québec culture. There’s a sugar shack culture and a traditional culture of hunting and agriculture. When I was growing up, it was very common to be anywhere along the route to the North and hear French spoken. I remember our car breaking down in the winter once and knocking on a farmhouse door, and it was a couple who didn’t speak English.

I just feel like the Republican administration is so confused if they think that they can tell us stories about who people in Canada are to us or that they’re our enemies. They’re really, really mistaken and underestimating our bonds with those people. It’s upsetting.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2025.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!