Between 1875 and 1932, Acadia's first playwrights all sought to underline the courage, the determination and the resilience of the Acadian people throughout its history, thus heralding the advent, several decades later, of a contemporary Acadian theatre focused on both collective and
individual liberation. During the 1970s, Acadia and its playwrights took an active part in the political and social upheaval which was sweeping the Western world. A new kind of theatre emerged which contested traditional values and which focused upon breaking the yoke of a social, political,
economic, cultural and linguistic oppression that weighed upon the Acadian people since its return from the Great Deportation more than two centuries earlier. Simultaneously all forms of oppression, religious, ideological, sexist and artistic, were being called into question. It is through
laughter, parody and carnivalesque subversion that this rejection of all forms of subservience is variously expressed in the works of Acadia's playwrights such as Antonine Maillet, Laval Goupil, Claude Renaud, Gracia Couturier, Rino-Morin Rossignol, Hermmgilde Chiasson and Mlanie Lger.