Michel Marc Bouchard is one of the most innovative, daring, and imaginative of Quebec playwrights, having written such complexly psychological – and complexly theatrical – works as Lilies and The Tale of Teeka. So you’ll excuse him if he also tries to make a decent living by writing commercial fare like Heat Wave, in which a recent widow tries to keep her affair with a young man secret from her doltish twins and doting neighbour. The cottage comedy has enjoyed great success in Bouchard’s native province, as have his two other “Leech Lake” plays (named for their setting). Either something’s getting lost in the translation, or this is a play that lives entirely in the theatre, where actors can go to town with their broadly drawn and very familiar characters, who spew double-entendres and other one-liners with industrious regularity. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Heat Wave knows its audience, and gives it what it wants – a reversal of the old man-young woman routine, a little sex, a lotta laughs, a couple of touching revelations, and a few sufficiently wacky, obsessive characters. Bouchard knows his audience, and judging by his success, his craft as well.

Heat Wave is a play of coincidences and deceptions, a bedroom farce without doors, in which the widow Gisele falls heavily for young Yannick, who once stole a car from neighbour Napoleon, who lusts for Gisele and doesn’t know she’s a widow. Along come the twins; gay Louis and straight and single Louisette, toting dad’s remains in a vacuum bag. You can pretty much guess the rest. In a play like this, the fun is in knowing the ending, and watching the playwright get there. If Bouchard’s jokes are funny, it’s hard to tell in Bill Glassco’s translation – the dialogue reads like subtitles, which has the effect of making you disbelieve much of what’s said in a play that already piles implausibility on top of coincidence.

As summer fare goes, you could do a lot worse; but I’ll take this major writer’s major writing any day of the week, winter or summer.